B1ff
The most famous pseudo, and the prototypical newbie. Articles from B1FF feature all uppercase letters sprinkled liberally with bangs, typos, ‘cute’ misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD OLD BIFF CUZ KØØL DOOD AN HE RITES REEL AWESUM THINGZ IN CAPITULL LETTRS LIKE THIS!!!), use (and often misuse) of fragments of talk mode abbreviations, a long sig block (sometimes even a doubled sig), and unbounded naivete. B1FF posts articles using his elder brother's VIC-20. B1FF's location is a mystery, as his articles appear to come from a variety of sites. However, BITNET seems to be the most frequent origin. The theory that B1FF is a denizen of BITNET is supported by B1FF's (unfortunately invalid) electronic mail address: B1FF@BIT.NET.
[1993: Now It Can Be Told! My spies inform me that B1FF was originally created by Joe Talmadge <jat@cup.hp.com>, also the author of the infamous and much-plagiarized “Flamer's Bible”. The BIFF filter he wrote was later passed to Richard Sexton, who posted BIFFisms much more widely. Versions have since been posted for the amusement of the net at large. See also Jeff K. —ESR]
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For the Usenet pseudonym, see B1FF.
B1ff is type of internet slang that was created in the early days of the Internet by groups who felt they were being watched by government officials or corporations. This was a major step towards full 1337 (Leet); however, they originally had different purposes. B1ff, which only changes words only enough so a program looking for certain words doesn't find them, whereas 1337 was created to prevent non-1337 humans from reading text.
During the early days of internet gaming, a new side of b1ff took a significant rise, when scripts edited the content of instant chat conversations. Today, however, most censoring scripts can compensate for the letter-number replacement. Thus, b1ff has mainly evolved into 1337, a more introverted language which, although it does include letter-number replacement, also includes letter mixing (e.g. "pr0n"), similar-sound substitution (e.g. "h4xx" for "hack"), 'building' a letter from multiple characters (e.g. x from ><), and the invention of new words as a substitute for common words.
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