welcome to camp telophase

Got a spam comment over on LJ, and before I report and ban it, I'm testing to see if it's one of those bots that parse your reply content and then post a snippet scraped from somewhere else that corresponds roughly to what you say. (I got into an argument with one of those bots once before realizing what it was and deleting the entire exchange in shame, which I now regret because I want to go back and reread it! And it may thereby have passed the Turing test.)

It's reasonably clever--it's got a recipe it scraped from somewhere on its LJ page, and sounds human, except that the second half of comment would have been more suited to a regular reader of my LJ and not a random drop-by, which is what they were pretending to be. Well, and the first half was fairly stupid, because I don't think many of us have been overly frustrated by choosing an exciting salad dressing. Okay, so it doesn't sound that human after all.

(The sales pitch is in the LJ profile, for a bankruptcy attorney.)

Hey LJ why can I not reply to a comment in my own post? Thanks for nothing!

(I click the 'Add a comment' button...nothing happens. Or perhaps the recipient will get 43535643 copies of the reply later this evening from all the times I've clicked the button.)

...if you don't like the latest round of LJ changes, Dreamwidth has account creation open for the rest of the month, no invite code needed.

If any of you are unnerved enough by the DDoS attacks on LJ and want a backup on Dreamwidth, I've got several codes - drop me a line here (or by the email on my profile if you want to be a bit more anonymous).

Well, it now seems they've implemented something that works the way they wanted it to - in other words, if you post a non-affiliate link to a site like Amazon.com that gives money for referrals, they change it to an affiliate link that gives money to LJ.

If you post an affiliate link that gives money to you, they don't touch it.

If you'd rather not give your money to LJ all-unknowing, or if the script running slows down your browsing, you can opt out for yourself, and I discovered last time that if you obfuscate your links with a URL shortener like bit.ly or tinyurl.com, then they leave it alone, if you'd rather people clicking on your links not support LJ all-unknowing.


Info and links here: http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_lounge/1016958.html