The Dink Network

For those who are unaware, Dmod.diz files are included with D-mods for the sake of DFarc or another front end to provide a title and description to the player. They consist of simple plain text files in which the first line is your D-mod title, and the second line is generally reserved for the author's name, with subsequent lines used for copyright info and a general description. To understand this general layout requires you to open such a file and peruse it for a few seconds before replacing the lines with your own data.

Judging by the name of this, I was hoping to see some sort of slightly overweight balding man with a beard and glasses to show up when running this program who then berates me for various indiscretions that I have apparently committed on Reddit or Tumblr etc. Unfortunately that was not the case. Instead I got a command line window that asked me a few questions about what I want to put in dmod.diz on each line before quitting. At no point does it perform any input validation, so you can write just about anything in any of the fields and it won't warn you at all that "anus" is not actually a month, for instance. Afterwards, it spits out a dmod.diz file which not only includes your input across multiple lines with incredibly poor spacing and line termination but also a largely incomprehensible line from the author that ruins your new dmod.diz file completely. To add to the general irritation that underpins the gestalt of this program, the readme file is not in a standard plain text file format but instead is a WordPerfect file. Thankfully Microsoft Word can open it, assuming you'd ever want to read the absolute drivel that is exclaimed within.

It turns out that the readme is actually the real treat of "Problematic Dink Diz Pro" and somehow manages to be worse than the program itself. The author starts with a general disclaimer that he will not be responsible for any mishaps such as "Trijans"(sic) and the deletion of diz files. Apparently you're not allowed to copy it and claim it as your own either which was no doubt a terrible disappointment for millions of people around the globe. From here, it goes onto to make the absurd claim that dmod.diz files are copyrighted by RTSoft, and then goes on to provide instructions for programmers on how to run the program externally.

Throughout every aspect of exploring "Dink Diz Pro" I was in utter disbelief. Why on earth would anyone use a program like this when it provides a worse experience compared to that of a text editor? Why would a programmer want to run it from their own program when all it does is mangle the user's input by inserting the author's details in amongst what the user has typed in? Why would someone make a program like this in the first place, and why would they even consider releasing it? Why did the author name it "Problematic Dink Diz Pro" when the files are called Dmod.diz, and there's nothing professional about it? Of these, only the last question is easily answered, as it very clearly caused far more problems than it ever set out to solve.