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The article makes it sound like there was some ringing, but instead of looking out of the window or checking the door the residents called the police - probably because they were afraid of kids from across the road, which is a framing that their source, the very shitty Bild, just _loves_.

What really happened is that the ringing happened multiple times, residents looked out of the window and out of the door but couldn't find anyone, and only then called the police. More trustworthy sources than the Bild do not mention any abandoned house over the road, just that they assumed it must be someone who does the ringing, which is a very sensible assumption.

I suspect that German media only picked up on it because they could end their articles with the pun that "the perpetrator has been turned into a slug", which is a direct translation of a proverb which means that the perpetrator has been dressed down.

  "I thought it might be the kids from the abandoned house over the road,” Lisa, 30, a shop sales assistant told the tabloid Bild.

More concerning that there's an apparent house of feral children across the road.

I had a report from a business of possible unauthorized remote access in a point of sale. A touchscreen system was found logged in by an unknown admin overnight. There had been weird reports of the mouse cursor moving on its own.

After a lengthy quarantine and investigation that turned up nothing, I decided to go see this machine myself for context. While I was standing there taking everything in, a fly landed on the dirty touchscreen on a smear and tripped an on-screen button as it rubbed its legs together.

Everything clicked - it was just a fly and eventually some digging revealed someone had carelessly left an admin user available: ID 2, no password, which the fly inadvertently tapped into the touchscreen login UI with two lucky clicks.

Sadly it is not a new species, otherwise what a name it could have slagged...

Nacktschneckecus Klingelstreichus

Also mysterious... why did nobody just... walk downstairs to look? Use them peepers? At least we know no software engineers are to blame. Along with the slug, we are the one group most reluctant to walk.

We had physical buttons for decades. That required a certain amount of deliberate physical action and force by a person to press the doorbell.

Now designers and manufacturers have decided that everyone wants and needs touch sensors.

Sacrifice in the process -

Inadvertent triggers and lack of tactile feedback.

> At first they had suspected the so-called klingelstreich (bell prank), a sometimes popular pastime among German youths.

Does German sound funny to everybody or just the English speaking world?

Sounds like a broken doorbell button design.

There’s an alternate universe where programmers are fixing slugs because it wasn’t a bug that died in a mainframe transistor

It WAS playing ding-dong-ditch, but it couldn't get away fast enough

Okay, I can see that maybe this could be a funny story in the local paper, but it's quite strange that it ended up as _international news_.

Slugs aren't known for quick getaways. Did no one check the doorbell before calling the police?

Since slugs are cold-blooded, I wonder if it was captured by the (presumably backlit) doorbell touch panel because of the panel's warmth.

Over the years, I've had a few instances of spiders causing a related issue with our Ring doorbell camera. Like getting a notification of someone at the front door in the middle of the night, then you load it up and a giant spider is just sat right on the lens. Never had any bell presses, but I guess in this case it's one of those conducting plates.

I have a spider named Billy (Silly Billy) that lives behind my doorbell and occasionally sets off the motion sensors when he ventures out. Thankfully, mine is still the physical push button, so he hasn't managed to ring it yet.

If the slug violates the terms of release, there is a DIY Perks solution for that: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oAA9nCqNfR4

I had a similar experience. It was a dark summer night, 03:00 o'clock. Me and my partner were semi-asleep when suddenly a loud noise from the kitchen wakes us up. It sounds eerily electro-mechanical. And then some seconds later, it happens again. And again. And again. We had no pets, no one else living with us, so we were concerned someone had broken into our apartment in the middle of the night. I mustered up the courage to enter the kitchen. There are no people there, not even a small animal. I turn on the lights and confirm that. But I see the lid of our bin is open. It was a stupid purchase from costco, this household bin with an automated lid that used a depth sensor. Turns out, there was a slug walking all over the sensor. This is how we figured out we had a big hole somewhere under the kitchen furnishings that was a source of slugs. We moved away in less than a year, but boy was it not fun to think about the slimy mess that may have been left on the countertops.

...at a certain point I think you just have to assume that the doorbell is malfunctioning, no?

We've had that happen. It was annoying as hell. We didn't call the police, though. (Pretty funny that it was a slug and not a dying piece of electronics, I must say.)

I went through several emotions reading this article.

It has to be said, that I probably have the habit of most people: skim the title, skip to the comments, skim the article, skip back to the comments, and maybe if I am intrigued enough (as I was this time) read the article.

Well, the more I skipped back and forth the funnier it became. Realized it wasn't the UK started trying to find that abandoned feral children apartment and what not. Then I decided to the read the whole article when a depressing thought mixed with indignation hit me.

The article reads like the following llm prompt: "translate this article from BILD to english make it short and funny" voilá. I still hold the Guardian in a little higher regard than other online media, but this ended up being a small gut punch. But I had fun, thanks chatgpt.

OMG I've been telling a joke about a slug that rings a bell. This used to be so unreal

How dare it? It should be promptly arrested, pour decourager les autres

I live in a pretty rough neighborhood - it happens around here a lot.

Teenage slugs causing havoc on a Saturday night after drinking beer in the park.

Does it talk?

As someone from the UK, this really threw me for a second!

I wonder if the residents are millionaires #iykyk

I envy people with such quiet, peaceful lives that they consider this a newsworthy problem.

Not sure what the problem is.

I imagine that they, quite reasonably, expected that the prankster was some slimy character. And it looks like they were correct.