Vaguely in honour of Monty Python’s anniversary and vaguely in honour of the fact that I haven’t posted in ages. Here’s a quick dive into the spam comments folder. Except I can only find two that are remotely interesting. Maybe I need to learn to read Russian.
What is the budget and head count of the office of accountability?
Ooo, I like the sly “why is there only one Monopoly Commission” implication behind the question. However, in this case the answer is very easy to find.
Well, they haven’t replied and it seens that my response contains enough context to avoid the need to do anything that might be “strictly prohibited”
Thanks for your email [regarding advertising on our site]. I would be interested in finding out more about your product, however I have a few questions first.
You say that our site matches the target demographic of your client. 1. Is that client, singular? Or clients, plural. 2. What is the target demographic, and how did you determine what the demographic of our site was?
You say that you would like to place text based adverts on our site. 3. What technology would be used to deliver the adverts? 4. What mechanisms would be used to allow us to vet adverts and remove unsuitable ones?
I’m more used to dealing with ad networks who work on a CPM or referral basis rather than a flat fee. 5. Is the annual fee paid in advance or in arrears? 6. Do you offer any other payment methods? We would prefer a cheque or bank transfer.
7. Can you provide contact details for any other publishers as referrals? 8. Can you provide a sample contract for us to look at?
I see that your offices are in St. John Street, I used to work round the corner in Clerkenwell Green. Do you ever go for a drink in that Belgian bar down the alleyway?
look forward to hearing from you soon, Steve
I think that those are al reasonable questions. I wouldn’t enter into any sort of business relationship without wanting to know these sorts of thing. But they didn’t seem to want to follow up.
This message was sent by Someone, it is STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL and is solely for the individual or organisation to whom it is addressed. It may contain PRIVILEGED and CONFIDENTIAL information. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication and its contents is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication and its contents in error, please notify us at Some email address and delete it and any copies from your computer.
Does anyone ever pay any attention to these disclaimers? Has anyone ever proved whether they are legally enforceable?
If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication and its contents is strictly prohibited.
So If I am the intended recipient then I’m not being notified of the above and I can do what I like with it? Because I’d really like to post the message I got and the response I sent back (which hasn’t, so far, produced any sort of follow up). Ah f**kit, you know me, I’ll post it anyway. Just give them a couple more days to take the opportunity to make fools of themselves.
Frixo is a road / motorway traffic reporting site and think it may be a useful resource for your readers. It gives users up to date information as the site gets updated every 3 minutes via feeds from various sources including the government’s official Highways Agency site.
Thank you for your consideration.
Kind Regards,
Mike
I’m afraid that won’t be possible. That’s my CV page and unless you’re asking for me to come and work on your site it wouldn’t be fair of me to claim your site as my own work.
I was wondering whether you would like to link to my site http://www.frixo.com from your page?
Yesterday I did something that made me feel like a total plonker. I was using a social networking site (I won’t say which one – though many of you will know by now) and as these sites do it has the feature to check your webmail address book for existing members and send invites to other people. I avoided the “Auto-invite” option and went to “Manually invite”. The next screen presented me with the title “Find your friends who are already on XXXXX” and a button labelled “Next”, and a list of addresses with a pre-ticked checkbox next to each (and no uncheck all option).
Oops. Pressing that Next button did not find which friends were already members. It sent invites to everyone.
I’m really sorry if I spammed you.
Usability lessons
Don’t use “Next” as a label for the final step. To me, and I think to a sizeable number of others as well, “Next” implies that you’ll be going onto the next step of a multi-step process. The final step that actually does something meaningful should have a more meaningful label.
Give every page or every step of a process a unique page heading.
Limit the number of emails a single user can generate at one time.
Provide tools to help users manipulate large sets of data (i.e. an uncheck all option).
User lessons
Don’t assume that the people making the site have got the above right.
If you’re even slightly confused as to what will happen, assume the worst rather than the best and act accordingly.
After this I had a look at my Gmail address book. It was full of rubbish. People I had emailed just once (all those unsubscribe@ or abuse@ addresses for example. Irony.); people who had left the companies and email addresses in question behind; lots of people I didn’t recognise at all; at least six of my own email addresses.
How many of you ever manage your Gmail address book? There’s a bunch of features in there for doing so, but one of the selling points of Gmail is that you never need to manage anything – there’s enough storage and enough processing power on the Google servers to keep everything, forever.
We’re trapped in a half-way world where the computing power allows us to never delete or manually manage anything but the interfaces and mashups only really work if you do.
What is up with all the spam comments that reference prayers? They’ve been popping up for a few months now and this one, plucked from the Akismet filter, is fairly typical:
I like this website. This website helped me with prayer learning. Good job. Thank you. Please provide more French prayers. Bye-bye.a
The BBC ran a story today about how spammers make money. They estimated that with a click through rate of just 0.00001% it could be possible to make up to $2 million a year.
At work we deal on click through rates of double digit percentages and yet somehow don’t make $200 billion a year. The downside of being all ethical and using an opt-in list.
Meanwhile I got this spam in my akismet cesspool:
Hi there! My first post at this great blog! I wanna show u my dayly updated blog: [adjective adjective verb noun] Have a nice day! BB!
P.S. if you don’t want to see this message please write me to [email] with subject “NO ADS” and URL of your forum
Thank you for cooperation!
Allowing for the fact that 1 in 100,000 people are stupid enough to buy drugs from a spammer, how many webmasters are stupid enoiugh to send a forum URL to a spammer?
My client is looking for somebody who can work self-sufficient and turn projects round quickly, while maintaining high standards both visually and technically.
…
If you have any of the following this will be useful. AJAX, BACK-END BUILT WEBSITE AND Action script.
What is a “BACK-END BUILT WEBSITE”? And does “[ContactFirstName]” know how to build one?
Oh, and of course they can’t tell the difference between a designer and a developer (nor the difference between an adjective and an adverb).
السعودية تبني سوراً بمليار دولار على الحدود العراقية; الخل يساعد في الكشف المبكر عن سرطان عنق الرحم
I love getting spam in random languages. I also love cutting and pasting rtl into an editor. You never know what DEL, BACKSPACE or the cursor keys will do.
Oh, and I love seeing how well people’s RSS readers cope…
amused
annoyed
confused
mischievous