This second chapter of Dotcom Storytime comes a few months after the gonorrhea email. I was still working primarily on one-off marketing microsites for Levi.com, usually dovetailing with the Levi's traditional media campaigns composed by Chiat-Day.

This time around we were creating the online component for the "Wore Them" campaign. If you think about it, you might remember this one. Levi's bought hundreds of billboards in 12 metropolitan areas, painted them all white save for the red-tab logo hanging off the top of the right edge, and "Calvin Wore Them" "Tommy Wore Them" or "Ralph Wore Them" in a bold, black rough typewriter font across the center. The campaign referred to Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Ralph Lauren, respectively. It was supposed to be an edgy, controversial campaign, and while there was both an edge and a controversy related to the campaign, it had nothing to do with the billboards.

The billboards were all supposed to be painted simultaneously after the close of business on Friday, the idea being that if Calvin, Ralph, and Tommy were to file injunctions to have the billboards taken down, they would at least have to wait until Monday for the lawyers and judges to get back to work. The funny part here is that, as it turns out, all three of them loved the campaign, and happily admitted the powerful effect that Levi's had on their own aspirations while growing up. The kicker was when, feeling left out, Gianni Versache paid for a New York billboard in the same style that said, "Gianni Wore Them, Too."

But back to the dotcom side... We had to create a site that would live for the duration of the campaign, capture the spirit of the billboards, and not take an inordinate amount of time or effort to implement. In the end, Colleen, Michael and I came up with a single page with the red tab in the corner, a white background, and hundreds of names in alternating red and black type flowing without breaks over the entire page, saying "Kevin Fox wore them. Colleen Stokes wore them. Michael Borosky wore them. John Doe wore them." and so on. At the bottom of the page there was an entry field for typing in your own first and last name and submitting them. Then the page would reload, with your name added to the front of the list. There were also buttons for viewing the list sorted by first name or last name as well as the default reverse chronological listing. I wish I had a screen shot, because by the end it was pretty impressive, with close to 26,000 names engraved like a war memorial to fashion.

But the site would have looked pretty pitiful when it started out with only 4 or 5 names on the list, so Jordan sent out an email to all of CKS (roughly 1800 people in 13 offices around the US) showing off the page and asking them to put names in. And then the fun began.

Within minutes the page started filling up with names, but things quickly got out of hand. For every "Frederick Harrison wore them" there was an "Adolf Hitler wore them." Some were innocuous, like Orrin's "Captain Poopyshanks wore them" and some were political "Chinese Sweatshoppers wore them." The vast majority, however, were part of a running theme along the lines of "[name deleted] is a fucking jerk and wore them. [name deleted] shat-in-his-pants and wore them. [name deleted] carved-up-women-and-made-suede-jackets-and wore them." You get the picture. ([name deleted] isn't anyone I know, by the way).

Jordan was irate. The client hadn't seen the page yet, but they were supposed to within a few hours, and nothing in the email he sent to the company indicated that the site wasn't, in fact, live.

Now you might ask yourself, "How clever of a programmer is Kevin? Is he the sort of person who would store all the responses in a database for easy sorting, and just for kicks include the IP numbers and timestamp of each submission alongside the first and last name fields?" You might think I'm just that paranoid/curious/clever/anal. And you'd be right.

So naturally Jordan's first question to me is, "Can we tell who posted these?" and, sitting in my office next to my officemate Orrin, who at that very moment was typing something along the lines of "Butt Commander wore them," I admitted that, yes, we have the technology.

I'd already been browsing through the IPs and comparing them to a list of subnets I'd snagged from Ely, our IT guy, and I knew that the vast majority of the bad ones weren't coming from our own office. In fact, almost all of them were coming from IPs within the New York office's subnet, and from another subnet outside of CKS, which a little tracerouting and reverse DNSing revealed to be some advertising company in Manhattan. As I expected, Jordan had a little slap-on-the-wrist chat with the handful from our office who contributed less-than-appropriate names, ("Meat Helmets wore them") but placed most of his rancor where it belonged, on the East coast. The SF and NY general managers had a little heart to heart.

While I was quickly writing an admin utility to allow us to screen and approve posts before putting them live (along with a filter that would catch likely inappropriate entries (regex: chinese, fuck, hitler, piss, your, mama, etc.) and make guesses that the administrator would use as a guide. For the next three weeks, it was one person's job (Thanks Mark V.!) to check the admin page every 15 minutes or so and approve or deny the names.

At any rate, some things certainly slipped through our filters, but for the most part the page was a big success. It was fun, the page was very popular, and the client never knew that it was anything but a huge success.