It's no surprise our license plate system is abysmal

"winterlegacy, here 'till the end" (winterlegacy)
12/12/2018 at 00:30 • Filed to: Front Page

Relevant to the FP post, after the jump.

!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!

Let me walk you through our license plate system.

!!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! is where you land, and it’s the first search result if you look for “maine license plates” on your Googolplex9999.

If you don’t see an issue right away, you may have never left the 2000s - see a doctor if symptoms persist. Regardless, this website was made in 2006, and has basically only been changed to get it functional on modern web browsers.

Okay, let’s continue on the adventure by submitting a request to see if we have a passenger plate available...

Oh hey, that’s new, a reCaptcha. They used to not have this. I guess someone made enough requests to their portal to see if something was available that they thought there was a bot responsible for it. Do they care enough? (No.)

Let’s see if this Oppo plate is available...

Oh hey, it is. Cool. Any Maine oppos wanna snag this?

Also, while I was messing around with this, I found out that the system encodes the text for the license plate in plain text, so you can turn the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! into something quite rude by simply replacing what comes after the PLATE_NUMBER= field.

edit: buffer image

DISCUSSION (2)

Svend > winterlegacy, here 'till the end
12/12/2018 at 02:29

Gr anted some of those maybe shouldn’ t of got through but wasn’t there an asian woman the other week complained about seeing licence plates that had ‘JAP’ on them!?

I’m sorry, she found the three letter word ‘JAP’ offensive. I mean even Japanese companies often use the prefix JAP on parcel, memos, etc... It’s tenuous at best and complaining and banning something for the sake of it.

winterlegacy, here 'till the end > Svend
12/12/2018 at 10:53

Completely different culture as well.

I’m not sure if this factors in at all, but Maine is also one of the whitest states in the United States, demographically.