If you’ve been perusing certain back entries on this site (#18, #33, #45, #47 and/or #52), you may have noticed a large quantity of comments at certain times that suddenly go away again. There’s a reason for that—I have no interest in supporting unpaid advertisements for online poker.
The website has a nice little function that sends me an e-mail when someone adds a comment. Thus, I can sit back for months at a time and never hear anything. (Thank God for stupid mailing lists on Yahoo! or my Inbox would be in a constant state of emptiness.) I finally got that system set up a few days before flying out to L.A., didn’t get any messages (“No way!” “Way!”), then left and didn’t think anything of it until I got back.
When looking through all the crap I didn’t want to bother reading, there were a few places in ye olde Inbox where I had a long string of messages—somewhere between 15 and 20 in a row each time—informing me that someone had posted a comment on the website. My first thought was that one person found it, thought a lot of what I’d posted was very insightful and decided to praise to my efforts. (Sure, it could have been criticism, but at that point, just thinking that someone was making comments provided me with a brief burst of euphoria.) Then I looked at the first e-mail. And the second. And the third. And all of the messages in all of the strings in the Inbox. Every single one was an ad for various online poker websites.
I got to spend the next couple hours finding the entries it posted on (almost exclusively the ones listed above), deleting the comments, then banning the ISP addresses they came from so that annoying source couldn’t annoy me any longer. Problem solved, right?
Nope. After a week or two, I discovered another string of “comment posted” messages in my e-mail account, so I got to go back, delete a bunch of additional ads for online poker, then ban a bunch of additional ISPs to prevent further annoyance. Problem solved, right? (You get the idea.)
So nowadays, I get to jump back to the website once in a while and delete a wide variety of spam that really doesn’t have any variety at all—each one is kinda different, but how about another topic once in a while? If someone would offer a way to develop bigger breasts or add an additional 4” onto my penis, I might leave that stuff around. Sure, it might be spam, but it also might inspire people to write and let me know that a lot of it was very insightful.
