Spam Flattery and Mr. Anonymous Commenter

It starts out innocently enough. Spam Flattery delivers the line. It’s a simple, common, worn out line meant to make you smile and maybe even blush a little. You know the type. They’re the lines everybody uses when they want to flatter you just enough, that you become a tiny bit self-absorbed; those wonderful little things they say to make it easier to take advantage of you, without you even realizing what they’re doing.

You toss your hair back, smile at the screen in front of yourself, cock your head off to one side and read the most delightful comments posted on your blog for all to see. They’re shy, the poor devils. They always sign in as Mr. Anonymous; sometimes they leave their name at the end of the comment, along with a link so you can visit them in return.

Mr. Anonymous says things like, “Appreciate this post. Will try it out.” Or “I’m going to link this page and share it.” That always gets your attention, right? I mean, we bloggers live for page views, and people linking to your work is like finding gold at the end of the rainbow.

Except there isn’t a rainbow in sight, it hasn’t rained in days and that site they’re linking to is nothing more than an advertisement for Viagra, Accutane, hemorrhoid cures or some other product you don’t want to advertise in the comments on your blog.

Oh, they’re good, these unsolicited, sales marketing spammers! They’re really good! Check out this comment left on an unsuspecting, unprotected blog:

Ηello! Ι unԁerstand this iѕ somewhat off-topic however 
I had to ask. Does managing a well-estаblisheԁ wеbѕite 
like yourѕ rеquirе a lot of ωоrk?
I аm bгand new to running a blog but I do 
write in my diary on a daily basis. I'd like to start a blog so I can share my personal experience and feelings online. Please let me know if you have any kind of ideas or tips for brand new aspiring bloggers. Appreciate it!

They close by leaving a link to their website. (Funny. They don’t have a clue about blogging, but they’ve managed to build a website!)

Whatever you do, don’t click on the link!

These Mr. Anonymous commenters are masters of deception! They draw you in and spit you out. Picture cookies, lots of them and viruses – well, I wouldn’t be surprised! Spyware, malware, Trojans – both kinds I’m afraid.

Trust me, you’re going to be getting tons of comments once the A – Z Challenge begins next month. The last thing you need to worry about is sorting through and finding the ones from Mr. Anonymous, and wasting time trying to delete them all. Not to mention the unsuspecting bloggers who might actually click on the links provided!

Take a minute right now. Go into your blog settings and turn off “Anonymous Comments.” Make your visitors own their identity, claim their name and document their source before they can leave a comment on your blog. This is standard practice in the world of blogging anyway. It eliminates a major percentage of spam from ever getting through…unlike the dreaded captcha that does absolutely nothing to protect your blog from anonymous spammers, and only serves to frustrate anyone trying to leave a comment on your blog – except the anonymous spammer, that is. They’ll jump through all the hoops they need to, just to sell a product or leave a malicious link on your blog!

Photo credit:  The Emblem of Anonymous, Kephir at English Wikipedia, Public Domain; No Spam, indolences, Public Domain; Blog-commentskkkkk, Cortega9, Creative Commons Attribution

©2013 All Rights Reserved

Contributed by M.J Joachim, find her at Lots of Crochet Stitches by M.J Joachim

Never On A Sunday...

I hope you all are relaxing, do you have a plan for the challenge?

I thought it might just be fun to sneak in on this Sunday. This cause their is something in the shadow of next Sunday.

Have a great day!
Jeremy [Retro]
Oh, No... Let's Go CRAZY!

A to Z Tip: Timing is Everything

This post is brought to you by Cindy Dwyer, another A-Z expert. Please welcome her – I found her advice really helpful even though I'm MST in the U.S.  She brought up some questions I hadn't even considered.

Like many bloggers, I have a full-time day job to support my writing habit. I leave the house at seven in the morning and get home at around five or five-thirty. So during the A to Z Challenge, I schedule my posts to go live in the wee hours of the night. This gives me several advantages. 

Since I sleep with my laptop next to the bed -- and really, who doesn't? ☺ -- when my alarm goes off at 6:00 a.m. EST, I can check to make sure that day's letter made it safely through the cyberspace gremlins before I even roll out of bed. If I don't fix any problems then, they stay broken until after dinner because, sadly, I do not have an IT department. (Once, I did come home to find my cat asleep on my laptop, but that wasn't quite what I had in mind when I wished I had help staying on top of the technical aspects of my website.)

Another great thing about posting early is that during those ten hours I'm gone, other A2Zers can be reading and commenting on my post. I do try to log onto my website during lunch to answer comments and visit a few blogs from the list. But on crazy days when I can't, at least my blog is current with that day's letter.

Even if you do have the entire day free to write your post, you still need to account for time zones. The A to Z Challenge attracts participants from around the world. Remember, New York is five hours behind London and sixteen hours behind eastern Australia. 

Say you live in California and have a habit of blogging after dinner. At 7:00 p.m. PST, it's two o'clock the following afternoon in parts of Australia, where people may have already posted "I" before you've had a chance to update your "G" post to "H". 

If you want your friends Down Under to read your letter of the day before they go to sleep, you really need to activate that entry before 8:00 a.m. EST.

And the opposite is true for bloggers on the other side of the world -- you may want to schedule your posts for a little later in the day to avoid appearing a letter ahead of the western hemisphere.

I'm curious to hear from prior A to Z participants. Did you try to post at the same time each day? Did the differences in time zones make you feel like you were always a little ahead (or behind) everyone else? 

These are excellent questions, and I'm curious how our international participants handle this issue.  Please speak up!

~Tina, very grateful for Cindy's excellent advice

A - Z "ing" through the A - Z Challenge

Ambitious beginnings

Cruising diligently

Exciting entertainment

Fantastic, golly-gee!

Heaven help us, hurry!

Inspire impressive jaunts

Kindly kick our kiesters

Lending labor, not laments

Motion mild manners

Never needing nasty names

Oppressing only captchas

Picky pop-ups in a frame

Quintessential quest

Quantificates rebuttals

Snatching snobby snaglines

Tried and true with titles

Useless unanimity

Verociously vivacious

Waging without weakness

XXVI – not one word less

Yin and yang have yielded

Zipping zigzags zestily

April’s Blogging Challenge

Is the testament, you see!

Brought to you by M.J Joachim.  Find her at Lots of Crochet Stitches

Photo credit:  Badges courtesy of A – Z Challenge and Charmaine Clancy

©2013 All Rights Reserved

Cryogenics: Can We Live Again In The Future?

Robert Ettinger, founder of the cryogenics movement, has died (at least for now) about eighteen months ago at the age of 92. Cryogenics is the process of freezing your head or your entire body in hopes science will one day figure out a way to bring you back from the dead. Ettinger will join his two wives (what was he thinking???) and his mother in frozen limbo. 

The facility is in Clinton Township, Michigan. Over 100 human corpses are floating in the gentle giant capsules filled with liquid nitrogen in hopes of one day living again. Nobody knows for sure whether we can ever restore consciousness frozen bodies, but cryopreservation is a phenomenon present in the animal kingdom and effective medical technology. 

Many livestock have developed tricks to survive temperatures below zero degrees Celsius, accounting and after periods of paralysis caused by frost. And scientists have made important progress in freezing living tissue and even of whole organs for medical purposes. 

The minimum price that the airline claims for his services is 28,000 dollars. Other organizations charge for customers and amounts up to $ 200,000 and offers the possibility of "neuroprezervării" instead of full body freeze, freezing heads may require only interested in the idea that personality and memories are stored in the brain and loaded into a computer or an artificial body in the future. 

One obstacle to overcome is frozen ice crystals within the bloodstream are very sharp. They can actually cut tissue and blood vessels, causing sever damage that make it difficult preserving vital parts of the human body. 

Question: Do you think this process of cryogenics is actually a possibility? Can we freeze our heads or bodies in hopes that one day technology will enable us to one day live again? 

Stephen Tremp, author of the BREAKTHROUGH series, has a B.A. in information systems and an MBA degree in global management. Stephen has a background in information systems, management, and finance and draws from this varied and complex experiential knowledge to write one-of-a-kind thrillers. His novels are enhanced by current events at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and other scientific research facilities around the world. These potential advances have the ability to change the way we perceive our universe and our place in it! 

You can visit Stephen Tremp at Breakthrough Blogs. 

BREAKTHROUGH and OPENING can be downloaded:  Kindle for $.99  through this weekend!

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