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Tuesday, March 30, 2010

It's Not Just Spiced Ham!

A couple of quick housekeeping items.

First of all, fellow blogger, frequent GoL reader/commenter and all around good egg Falen recently hosted a writing contest in which entrants were tasked with crafting a 750 word fiction piece using one of six prompts she provided. And, if I may toot my own horn, yours truly placed second, and now a gaggle of writerly goodies is winging its way to my house! Check out my piece here, and read the other winning pieces on her blog.

Secondly, I'm turning on the spam filter for comments, meaning that when commenting, you'll now have to enter a "word verification" word (like most other blogs and websites). I hate doing it (mainly because I like commenting without entering the word) but I hate going to two or three posts every morning and deleting spam out of the comments more (because I don't want to keep the spam comments; that makes it seem like they've won).


If you already comment frequently, hopefully this won't stop you from doing so. And if you've never left a comment before, well, then you won't notice a difference. But hopefully this won't stop you from doing so in some possible future. 

And, if anyone is curious, here is my Totally Scientific* list of The Five Most-Spammed Gentlemen of Leisure Posts For Some Reason:

  1. Boots Best - Food Inc.: The most recent entry on this list, and a recent claimer of the #1 spot, as almost every day for the last several weeks, I delete 1-2 comments containing nothing but Asian-looking characters from this post.
  2. Lost 5x08: The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham: Of all the Lost posts on the blog, don't ask me why this look at one of the pivotal episodes of Lost's fifth season draws the most attention from spammers.
  3. Land of Confusion: Dr. Bitz's ruminations on the Twins signing of Nathan to a long term contract in March of 2008 is the post of his that has drawn the most attention from spammers. Not sure why; I'd have figured his more recent post about the signing of Fake Joe Mauer would have been more appealing for spammers. Maybe it's the creepy Genesis puppet heads...
  4. We Are the Medicore X-Men Villains: Spammers apparently like this look at some of the less-quality X-Men villains.
  5. Baptismal of Hope: They also seem to like Boots, as his introductory post also draws significant spammer attention.  

*Not actually scientific at all

9 comments:

  1. Congrats. I loved your story. It totally deserved to win a spot on the top 4. I can't wait to see what tomorrow's is.

    As far as SPAM goes, I'm used to word verifications and the like. In fact, it prompted a plotty goodness for me once.

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  2. Great story!

    Also, it seems to me that the spammers on your blog have rather, eclectic tastes! They spam a little of everything it looks like:)

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  3. I've been thinking of doing the opposite, to invite spammers. More fodder for the blog! tehe. How else am I going to come up with things to ramble on about?

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  4. hey! you lied! there was no verification words!

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  5. @Christi, Jenn: Thanks! Much appreciated.

    @Jenn: The spammers do seem to have eclectic tastes, don't they? And though they're all signed as anonymous, I imagine it's different spammers, as each post attracts different types of spam.

    @Palindrome: The problem with using spam to generate ideas is that before long, you'll be writing about nothing but porn.

    Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but maybe not the direction in which you want your blog to go. :)

    Oh, and there are now.

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  6. Tee Hee! Spam!
    I haven't eaten spam in years

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  7. Congrats, Teebore.

    You know, I started reading your story but then I decided I should look up the rules to this contest first, which I did. Naturally, it started to get me thinking what I would write.

    Not to bore you with details (too late), but I ended up with an idea for a story that contained all of the prompts. It was genius!

    So I vowed that if such a contest presented itself again, that's what I'd do.

    And then I read the first place entry. *sigh* At least I can take solace in the fact that it was a winning idea.

    So, now that I've successfully made this comment all about me, congratulations again. Enjoy your chocolate!

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