Get over yourselves, nobody is going to spam you.
[CAUTION - language may get a little out of hand]
As ever I have been on a late night quest to spread the word of Sam and, hopefully, recruit a few more Sam-sites in the process, however I have hit a stumbling block in this epic quest :
“You must be a registered user to post comments”
Two words, rearrange them as you wish -
“FUCK. OFF.”
The majority of these paranoid webfools have a blog which gets maybe half a dozen reads per week, with no miraculous content of any kind. In short, the kind of website no spammer is ever going to visit (other than me, but it is personalised – I read the post I comment on).
If you want comments on your blog, and let’s face it we all do as we’re all attention whores in one form or another, don’t enforce registration for people to do so. I’ve been somewhat reticent about giving an email address in submissions (usually with the promise of “This mail won’t be used, honest!”) but I am prepared to make that sacrifice.
Effectively, by registering with a blog you are inviting spam from the corporation involved, and personally I doubt very strongly that LiveJournal or BlogZ or whoever have a single service I would be interested in.
This, naturally, brings me to another bone of contention. Internet “experts”.
To avoid a very lengthy rant on this subject I’m going to break it down in bullet fashion. These experts effectively advise anyone cretinous enough to listen to them that they require all of the following. Some of you may have heard this before. Get over it.
FireFox. #1 on the list. Listen up FireFools – IE works on every page there is. Your fad browser does not. The. End.
W3C Standards. What a lovely idea, but not necessary. The internet does not follow the standards, ergo the standards are not standard and therefore wrong. Your oh-so-important standards compliant browser doesn’t work on every site. Therefore your browser is inferior. I’ll go further. The only people who are allowed to use a browser other than IE are those who aren’t using a PC. If you’re using a PC and not using IE, you’re helping to ensure that we get back to the stage where there are 2 primary browsers where half the interweb works in one half in the other. Those days were ace! I hate you.
Virus protection. You only need virus protection if you are an idiot. I have had 2 viruses in the 8 years or so I’ve been online. The first was Melissa, which got everyone. The second was the Nimda virus which infected my work machine which has virus protection out the wazoo. Use your brain. The best virus protection there is.
Firewalls. Again, you’re not that important. Nobody is going to hack into your PC and steal the photos of your 23rd birthday part.
Spyware/Malware/Buzzwordware. The names are stupid, but the bastard Gator coporation is out there. Flush your PC once in a while with Adaware or Spybot S&D or whatever, job done. Any more discussion than that will probably be instigated by someone changing the subject from FireFad.
BitTorrent. Or torrents generally. It’s called theft in the real world. That’s its only purpose. Got over it, stop being bloody pompous.
Proxy servers. They exist so that internet assholes can piss people off by avoiding IP bans. Proxy operators are scum.
RSS feeds. A means whereby you just lost your traffic.
Next, commonly used phrases and their translations.
“Join my forum”. I have nothing to talk about and all 3 of my members are the admins. You can swear and EVERYTHING. I have no life. I want to be an internet god.
“Link exchange”. I have no traffic. Can I have some of yours?
“Web 2.0″. Hello I work for an internet marketing agency of some kind. We have ALL NEW buzzwords to sell you shit and make lots of money. I don’t actually understand any of it, I’m a fucking suit.
“Viral”. Anyone who says “viral” needs to be killed. Unless they work for the CDC. Seriously. Killed. They don’t fucking get it.
“E-zine”. Blog.
“Podcast”. Blog by tedious people who can’t type.
“Wiki”. I am a drain on humanity. The gene pool will be better without me.
“Social networking”. Can I interest you in Web 2.0? Bend over just a little further please.
“Search engine optimisation”. We make money by ensuring that your pointless fucking link hits the top of Google supressing better websites.
“Tabbed browsing”. I’m too stupid to click on the bar at the bottom of my screen.
“Plugin”. Spyware.
“Free”. Spyware.
“Pop up blocker”. I’m too stupid to be able to close a window. I’m part of the reason that flash now needs to be clicked on before it’ll work. I don’t deserve to live.
“Codec”. This movie was encoded by someone who wants less than 0.05% of people who download it to view it.
“Cyber-[insert anything]“. I’m new to this.
“Data mining”. I used to work for a parasitic agency.
I’m boring myself now.
To cut a long story short, don’t insist on making people register if you only have 3 visitors. Don’t act all important about the internet, it’s really not that complicated. Don’t blather on using terminology you heard from any agency or marketing person. Don’t write a blog. Don’t call yourself a blogger. Never utter the term “blogosphere”.
Break any of the above rules and your name will be added to the list who will be first against the wall when I take over.
Thank you.
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
No related posts.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 10:44 am and is filed under Ranty.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
