While doing some research for my decompiling session at Flash on the Beach, I came across this gem of a post on the Adobe ActionScript 3 message board. Someone posts a block of code and asks “I’m getting 3 compiling errors when I test my flash movie: could you guys give me some advice on how to sort out these issues and correct them. its driving me crazy trying to resolve the problem.”

And then he posts the code. And if you have ever decompiled any ActionScript code, it’s painfully obvious what the guy is doing: he’s ripping off someone else’s code, then complaining in the Adobe forum that he can’t figure out why it won’t compile, and asking people to fix his broken, stolen code.

Here’s a snippet of his code:

public function BEShell()
        {
1  0 39            instance = this;
            Logger.target = new FirebugTarget();
            var _loc_1:* = loaderInfo.loaderURL;
            if (_loc_1.indexOf("env1") != -1 || _loc_1.indexOf("Akqa") != -1
                        || _loc_1.indexOf("dev.site.com") != -1)
            {
            }
            else
            {
                Logger.mode = Logger.PRODUCTION_MODE;
                stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP, keyHandler);
            }// end else if
            return;
        }// end function

That’s very clearly, without question, decompiled code. It even has some extra line number information included in the dump! And that’s what was tripping the guy up. He couldn’t understand why that beginning line that starts with “1 0 39…” wouldn’t compile!

Sometimes I’m just amazed by people. Like, really? You have the balls to steal someone’s code, then post it in a public forum and ask for help?

And of course maybe I’m totally off base, maybe the guy works for the company that originally wrote the code (seems to be a Flash agency called AKQA) and maybe he just got pulled in to fix some co-workers work and they lost the original source and they need to use decompiled code since that’s all they have… yeah… maybe…