Susan Hated Literature

Yet another warning, I may be altering the template again, there may be a problem with the commenting, so if you can’t see the submit button when you try to comment email me fencesitter at gmail dot com at let me know. If you can submit comments well then, there is no need to do anything. I suppose if you feel left out you could leave a comment, to prove it works, unless you are one of the bajillion spammers out there. In which case don’t leave a comment, cause it’ll only be eradicated by the anti-spam stuff and so you’ll have wasted your time.

Course if you are a spammer then you aren’t reading this at all, cause most likely your a spambot and so are programmed to annoy and make people make with the “grrrr” sound as they find yet another [insert name of drug] free here, or satisfy the woman in your life, or [insert own spam message]

Has anyone else noticed the most recent spam *trick*? The “please don’t delete these links, I need the money for my children” line that has been stuck at the beginning of some of my most recent spam comments. That weak plea is worthy of nothing save a most withering “Whatever dude, I totally believe you.”

Right, sin é, I’m off to sleep but before I do, a word of warning…
Don’t drink too much water. It’ll kill ya!

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I’m surely not the only person to have noticed this surge in spam comments? Or more accurately, in trackback spam. Tis annoying so it is.

It is Friday today, don’t know if you noticed, I almost didn’t. So yay, weekend time. And it feels more like a Wednesday, which comes from not working Monday and Tuesday I suppose One of our lecturers left at the end of last term, he is heading off foreign and left in a load of his old books as a donation before he went, so I’m working my way through them. Then there is shelf-tidies and sorting out exam papers and what not, to be done. But should be plenty of time, most of our students aren’t back til the end of the month so we are fairly quiet. Just the odd body around the library.

Have to go into Peats on Sat and see if they’ll fix my mp3 player, Manny just won’t start up, which is a tad annoying. I have my receipt and everything so hopefully it’ll be straight forward enough.

The Friday Five:
1. Do you have any pets? If so, how many, and what are their names?

- Technically no. But the family have the mutt and the cat. Shady and Taz. There is also a goldfish, but I don’t know its name. And the flatmate has a goldfish, called Frank.

2. What was your very first pet? Do you remember its name?

- The first pet we had was a cat. Blackie, cause she was black.

3. Is there an animal you would never have as a pet?

- Any insect or suchlike. Don’t see the point.

4. What common pet have you always wanted but never had? Why not?

- a horse. Too expensive and nowhere to keep one.

5. What wild animal (extinct or not) would you own if you didn’t have to worry about its adjustment or the cost of captivity?

- Uhm. If I also didn’t have to worry about space, training, obedience etc I’d go for a velociraptor. Well, a whole pack of em just like in Jurassic Park only without the killing of people I know. (image borrowed from here)

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Okay, I’m going a bit mad what with changing template here and over at Cunning Quotes, but it was bugging me that I kept having to rescue comments. And the only reason I can see why it’d suddenly stop working properly like that is the theme.

And cause I’m away over the weekend, and won’t be saving incorrectly spammed comments the only other option was to turn spam karma off. Which I didn’t want to do. So we have a new template. It needs a little more messing about with, but for now it is grand. It might last. It might not, we’ll see.

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Spam Karma seems to have eaten quite a few genuine comments recently. I think I’ve saved most, but a few may have been totally devoured. Sorry bout that, but I didn’t notice cause I was preoccupied with the move. Anyways, figured I may as well reply to some of the comments here:

• We do have visits from cats, but never Siamese, and they are never invited. Trespassing feral beasts.
• The girl is River, from Serenity. But you can change the images. Up the very top there are a few selections; River (the default version), LoTR, Jayne and Strandhill (which has a white background). I’m not quite as happy with some of these images as I am with the ones over on Susan Hated Literature, but they’ll do for now. I still have a bit of work to do, like change the archives so the “optional excerpt” shows up, or in my version the explanation for the post titles.
• No body has been intentionally blocked. The main reason I noticed that comments weren’t going through was that one of mine got stuck in transit. So if anyone’s doesn’t go through then drop me a note. Although I have changed the settings in the Spam Karma option, so hopefully that’ll help a bit.
• Thanks for all the nice template comments

I may have forgotten one or two things, but sure ask again and you may receive.

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Not too many spam comments make it past Spam Karma, and those that do are mostly trapped in the moderated comments section. So they aren’t out there bothering you readers^[1] but every now and then I have to delete a load, or confirm they are spam. For some reason this happens more over on Susan Hated Literature, and normally, if it does occur, there will be 5 or 6 on the same post. And then the following day the same, or similar ones on a different post. It doesn’t bother me, not any more.

But I have been amused to see a recent trend develop. Not the random segments of words, though that can throw up some interesting phrases, but the fact that more and more the messages seem to start off with an apology. “Sorry for this” or “I’m sorry ;( ” or “I don’t want to but”

It must be forced spammage, don’t you think? Somewhere, out there a group of poor unwilling spammers must sit, surfing and typing away with evil terrorist types holding guns to their heads. It makes me very sad. So it does.

I wonder, do they have targets to meet. Must make spam appear of X amount of sites or the spamorists will shoot my toe off. Must get Y incoming links or the spamorists will kneecap me?

Still doesn’t make me feel in the slightest bit guilty^[2] as I hit that “Spam” button and prevent that comment on how great my site is, and don’t I want to get some terrific new ringtones from appearing.

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The census is coming, and people are up in arms^[1] about Question 14, which asks about “cultural and ethnic backgrounds” and whether a person is White Irish, Black Irish, Asian, Traveller etc etc. Well, not really etc, because there are only a few options, but there is the catch-all other. So what I want to know is, do the Central Statistics Office really think that the Others have come all the way from an island that looks suspiciously like Hawai’i just to fill in the census?

But anyways, the campaign to not answer Question 14 is sweeping across the blogverse^[2] But that’s not what I mean to blog about, what I meant to blog about was the hassle that commenting is becoming.

At first you could just leave a comment anywhere you went. Then you had to make sure you had an email address. Then some blogspot accounts want you to be a blogger member. Now that isn’t enough, you have to have a blogger account and fill in those verification details. And with msn.spaces you have to have a passport identity thing.

Bloody spammers. Ruining the world so they are. I have a blogger account, and visit plenty of blogspot blogs, so I’ve gotten used to that. But having to sign up for other accounts, which I’ll then have to remember passwords for? Nah, I’ve had enough of random accounts all over the shop.

Hassle = me not commenting

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Okay so, I think I’ve gotten rid of Akismet. I hope so. And I’ve installed Spam Karma 2 instead. I did have this before, but an upgrade messed it up. But after messing about in sql, which I know nothing about, it now seems, seems to be working. So leave comments testing and we’ll see if things are hunky dory, or still craptacular.

So basically this is an open call to leave a comment about anything. Even if you’ve never visited the site before, just say hello, or something

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