Category: Annoyances

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Comments on this site are now moderated. After a week of daily spam runs that have managed to get past other blocking methods, I’m tired of messing with it. At least with moderation, they won’t show up on the site.

This means that when you post a comment, it will not show up immediately. One of us will have to get the moderation notice and approve the message before it will appear.

I apologize to those who want to make actual comments on our posts. Just one more thing for which you can thank the spammers.

Update: It turns out it could have been much worse. The run of about 15 comment spams that showed up this morning turns out to be the few that made it through out of a total of 357. Over the course of 20 minutes this morning, a network of 126 zombies posted nearly 360 junk comments to this site, and 95% of them were rejected immediately. On one hand, it gives me a bit more faith in the countermeasures, but on the other hand, the scale of the attack is just staggering.

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A truism of television is that they aren’t in the entertainment business, they’re in the advertising business. Their job is selling commercials, and the shows you watch are nothing but an enticement to get you to watch long enough that you’ll see the ads. This is true for ad-based websites as well. The content is just there to get you coming back so you’ll see and click on the ads. (I’ve always had a problem with the idea of using click-through as the primary measurement of an ad’s success, but that’s another story.)

The problem here is that a balance needs to be struck between content and ads: Tilt too much toward content, and you need another business model to pay for hosting. Tilt too much toward ads, and people will stop visiting your site—or start blocking your ads. The more intrusive and annoying the ads, the more likely people will block them.

I rarely block ads. (Of course, I don’t click on them very often, either.) I figure if the website owner needs an ad banner to pay for hosting and/or make a profit and continue providing the site, that’s fine…as long as it doesn’t distract from the content. Remember, I’m not there for the ads, they have to convince me to come to their page, and if the ads make an otherwise-appealing site too annoying to read…well, sorry, I’m either blocking the ads or I’m not coming back.

DevArticles is a good example of this. The page was so full of animated banners visually screaming for my attention, I could barely focus on the article long enough to read it. This one page prompted me to install the Adblock extension for Firefox at work and block everything coming from their ad server, just to be able to read it. Had they kept their ads sensible, like the dozens of ad-supported sites I frequent without blocking the ads, I probably would have bookmarked it as well. As it is, the site reminds me of a line from Babylon 5: “Too annoying to live.”

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Dear [insert advice columnist here],

I moved out of my parents’ home four years ago and have been speaking to them and my sister less and less over time. They rarely have time to visit us, and it is impractical for us to visit them at their home, due to the amount of junk accumulated in their house and my husband’s allergies to their cats. When we do see each other, I find myself uncomfortable with them, both politically and socially, as our interests have diverged. Last Christmas, rather than give generic gifts that would go unused and further clutter their home, my husband and I chose to make donations to charities in their names, and picked foundations and causes important to them. At the time, they seemed to approve of our choice. However, three days ago, my mother called to ask if we would be doing this again so that she could tell everyone to donate for us instead of giving gifts. They are apparently displeased with our nontraditional method of holiday giving and do not want to give us tangible gifts if they will not receive them in return. I don’t mind this for myself, as I dislike the commercial mess Christmas has become, but I’m curious to know if others have received similar reactions, and what you make of the situation. I’m getting the impression that for some, the thought isn’t what counts.

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Despite Bush’s appeal to Kerry supporters [in his acceptance speech], Cheney said the popular vote victory gave Bush a mandate and the Bush White House would continue pushing for the Republicans’ “clear agenda.”

Excuse me, but how the #@*! is a 51% victory a “mandate?”

In any other race, that would be called “barely squeaking by.”

Yes, it’s unusual for a presidential candidate to actually get more than 50% of the popular vote, but that still means 49% of the voters preferred someone else. If you broke a cookie in half, and got a 51%/48% split with 1% of crumbs, you wouldn’t notice the difference.

Last night there were state propositions hovering at around 53%/46%, and the LA Times thought they were too close to call. That kind of victory in a state race would never be considered a mandate, or a repudiation, etc. — it would have passed by the skin of its proverbial teeth. A 66% win? That would be a mandate. A 60% win? Maybe. But 51%? That’s a sign that you’d better look at what people wanted from your opponent, not a blank check to ignore half the population of the country.

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Every once in a while I listen to Star for a few minutes. And every once in a while I catch their station break. And I cringe whenever I hear them talk about being the whatever station for “L.A. and the O.C.”

I’ve lived in Orange County most of my life, and I have never heard anyone here refer to it as “The O.C.” Sometimes just “O.C.,” but really—when was the last time you heard someone say “I live in the L.A.” or “I’m from the New York?”

Incidentally, it seems that as far as IMDB knows, the show is filmed in L.A. Excuse me, the L.A.

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Time to add an “outrage” category. This is just insane: A church panel has invalidated a girl’s communion because she can’t eat wheat (original article here).

The girl has celiac disease, which means any amount of wheat can cause her serious health problems. A local priest was willing to let her use a rice-based wafer, but higher-ups declared it was invalid — that if there wasn’t wheat, it didn’t count. She can either take the communion with a wheat-based wafer, or not take it at all.

For all intents and purposes they’ve excommunicated this girl because of a medical condition.

Good thing I’m not Catholic and the sacrament doesn’t involve peanuts.

I wonder if the church would be willing to pay for emergency room visits (or funerals) resulting from this kind of situation?

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Some people think it’s a great idea to block spam by having their email system automatically reply to any unfamiliar address, forcing the sender to jump through hoops that spammers presumably won’t bother with.

About half an hour ago, the IEEE Communications Society sent out a call for papers on its mailing list.

So far I have gotten three challenge-response requests, two out-of-office notices, and a response to one of the CRs.

I expect to see more when I get back from lunch.

Update 2:30pm: Four more challenges, another vacation autoreply, and four more responses. No sign yet of any discussion, complaints, or even (as I half-expected) a rash of misdirected “unsubscribe me” messages.

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