WazooTrimcelerator

Humor aside, while it's simple enough to have a placeholder image where there is no uploaded image yet, having it being an obvious target for another, specific site isn't really cool.

Don't get me wrong, I completely get it and fully understand, though I don't think it's up for discussing here in the comments section, a forum topic would be more appropriate.

We'll tell their parents - what else?

Improbable humor aside, this was, as previously mentioned, a joke script intended for three purposes. To be funny for users watching it run (especially for the folks at MacRumors), to be funny for people who view its banner when it inevitably ends up on MR, and so that other people could reuse the banner on all new uploads as part of the included screenshots, which if spread far enough, might actually make a difference.

Who knows, maybe fogWraith could even make it a default inclusion when adding a new app or game.

I have noticed that it also does not collect description contents. All of my uploads here lacked their original description when they showed up on MR.

So on top of plagiarism, they can't even boast a competent scraping algorithm that captures the page's entirety.

Meanwhile, the folks at the Internet Archive have been doing literally just that for 25+ years.

What a terrible website. What sucks is not that they exist, but that people keep going there and giving them all the credit and reference. And even then, there wouldn't be anything at all wrong with that if they just provided all the downloads without any strings attached, and credited their original hosting locations. Given that, they would even be an asset to software preservation efforts, because they would serve as another failsafe in the event the Garden goes down.

Why does the world always have to work like this?

It isn't dangerous at all. It's a joke script, born out of a parodied running gag on the MacRumors PowerPC forum. It does not modify the system in any way, shape, or form, but serves to only entertain the user by what it has been told to display onscreen after a periodic time interval, which makes it look like it's doing something, when it's actually not. Reviewing the script contents with TextEdit will verify this. echo tells the system to repeat back a given string, sleep tells the system to wait for a specified amount of time before continuing onto the next command, and clear scrolls down a page, which naturally carries the effect of "clearing" the terminal window of all prior activity. Having been involved with the creation process of both, the way it runs is actually more akin to a stop motion animation than a traditional command script, believe it or not.

In general, scripts that do not require authentication to run are completely harmless, as thanks to how UNIX systems are built, they are incapable of modifying anything at the system-level because the system will block it when it lacks the permissions. The fact that it never asks for your password before running further confirms this, because it is literally incapable of just going around, doing whatever it wants.

It is categorized under "Novelties & Fun", after all.

Besides that, it was also made to serve the purpose of being a dummy application, as part of an experiment to prove that Macintosh Repository scrapes Macintosh Garden for new content, which is clarified here:

https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/macintosh-repository-test-1

This has been a suspicion of many for a long time, and as far as I'm aware, this is now the first attempt being made to outright prove it, hence the attached disclaimer in the screenshot box.

How to undo the changes?