Why do people put "!rant" at the beginning of their rants? Is it a bug?

= it is not a rant

The ! prefix comes from the != or !== inequality operator.

! means invert. So !rant means the post is not a "rant" per say, just a more generic post.

Oh ok thanks

It means rant start or not not a rant (literally a rant).

Similar to shell scripts
#!
But without the comment pound tag there, there is confusion about it meaning not like the logical not operation
If !(not true)

Basically it means nothing. :)

@rozzzly ! is an unary operator in its own right and just does logical negation of the statement following it in most C-based languages. Because of this many languages allow the syntax (a != b) instead of (!(a == b))

@arcadesdude most usage on devRant signifies that the following is not a rant, i.e. it's actually something positive