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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

There were two ways to reliably punt a person off AOL: spam them with IMs using a prog or simply pick up the phone line.

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A classic non-prog method was to link C:\CON\CON in a chat room, it made Windows 95/98 bluescreen.

AOL would let you play wav files in a chat room that everyone, who had that file on their system, would hear. You could play the default AOL sounds like {S gotmail and everyone in the chat would hear "You've Got Mail". When someone found out you could send {S con\con or {s aux\aux, you could clear out an entire chatroom since all other chatters would get a BSoD.

There were email punts as well that would crash the app if opened. It was very entertaining as a child to punt someone on your buddy list and hear the door slam as they repeatedly tried to open an email with a too good to be true subject line.

Different AOL versions had different exploits, too. For some versions, if you sent a single IM with a font size of 9999999999999999999999999999999999999... It would lock up their whole machine and they'd soon drop offline.

my biggest sense of pride back in the day was being "unpuntable". the process was insanely simple, delete or move aol's RichText.dll file and the client defaulted to plaintext. i would also use older versions of the client (i think 2.0 and older did not support HTML).

people would try to punt me and all i'd see in the IM window are the various (and there were many) combinations of HTML tags, which i would save and use myself to manually punt others.

Lol, I'm guessing that was some kind of unchecked overflow error. X-(

or tell them to press ALT+F4

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