> they literally couldn't print out their badge

I still don't quite get how this doesn't work. Why are they handling "NULL" as a special case? What's coercing "NULL" into null?

It was due to the way they exported the data. They used a SQL statement, and if you weren’t in a guild then the SQL would produce NULL. That output was then used to generate PDF badges, and it tried to do some filtering for NULL guilds. The person writing that script clearly did not anticipate there actually being a guild named NULL.

NULL or ‘NULL’? There’s a clear and obvious difference there.

Unless you're using ColdFusion https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-to-pass-null...

Bad coding.

It reminded me of a Wired article from 2015 about a guy with the last name "Null" - https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/