Topic: Roman Numerals

[Alieo]

@Foil/Phoil: If someone was to answer "Picture on the front page" of our forum, and they were ignorant and put, "a bunch of airplanes," (when they're REALLY Pyro-GX's) would you let them in? lol

[Matthew]

Pyro-GX is a bit specific. I'd say "Pyro" should be enough.

[Kaiaatzl]

I wouldn't.  "A bunch of airplanes" shows they don't know what they're talking about and they don't belong here.

[VANGUARD]

they better say Pyro being that's part of the title  

Sometimes I wonder why people even spam or have bots do it. It's just annoying, obxious, you have no life, you just want to be some pest, you're just some.....just some....hmm....why does that sound like me?

In a ll honesty, I just don't get it.

[Kaiaatzl]

They must think it works as advertising (companies do have some misconceptions about what works and what doesn't.  I recently read a book on it by Terry O'Riley -- this guy: http://www.cbc.ca/ageofpersuasion/).  Advertising only really works if you remember the product and you have positive mental associations for it.  I'm pretty sure (at least in my case) that spam would make me remember something -- but only to actively avoid buying it.

The general rule he said was: if it's annoying, by definition it doesn't work (at least on the people it annoys).  Someone should tell the spammers that.
Of course, some ads are just annoying because they're not aimed at you.  And some ads don't work because they advertise the wrong thing -- I used to see this TV commercial for an anti-depression medication, that spent most of the 5-minute commercial advertising its deadly side effects (not an overstatement) as it's legally required to, with only a short blurb at the beginning and the end touting the benefits... I think it was called "Abilify".  Very funny to see the people smiling on screen while the advertiser talked about all the different ways the drug might kill you.

[VANGUARD]

say something like that last night, not sure if it was called that, or something else. but yeah, the side effects were longer than what it was designed to do. and I have no idea why one takes it. They're almost all the same, like this mock advertisement that I just made up:

"take this to heal that, and the side effects are headache, bloating, (getting sick), leg pain, wrist pain, drowsiness, diarrhea, tightness in the stomach, cramps, loss of appetite, and slight chance of blindness and/or deafness. Take this to feel better!"

and the way it sounds on tv, mine sounds shorter.

[-<WillyP>-]

They must think it works as advertising...

No, it is much more complicated than just advertising.  Although sometimes it is just a matter of posting links to a site or sites, more often it has to do with how Google rates sites and pages, rank dilution, link and keyword dilution, etc.

In other words, let's say you have a site and you best keyword is 'glovies'.  If your website is the only site in the world with that word, obviously when somebody googles the word, your site will come up at the top.  Now, really, there are probably a few other sites that sell glovies, even though are the same product, they aren't called glovies, whatever, the word glovies is on the site and they want traffic from people searching for glovies.  Now the spammers get paid to take you down a notch so some of the traffic that should go to your site, will go to whoever is paying the spammers.  So the spammers spam millions of sites with the word glovies, and that renders it less useful as a search term.  Keyword dilution.  So people will search for other words in the description of the product, and have to go looking for the real site.  And that increases the chance of some of them landing on the spammer's employer's sites.  That is what they want.

Link dilution works similar.  By posting links to 'site a' from many sites that has no relevence to whatever 'site a' is about, the value of links to 'site a' is decreased.  So 'site b' has only links from site that are relevant to the content of 'site b' so those links move 'site b' higher in the rankings. Therefore more hits.

[VANGUARD]

so we have some Descent competition? I understand what you mean. it makes sense. I can see why some would, but it's still b.s.

I'm sure there are various reasons why this happens. some is what you mentioned, some is to collect personal data. some is to destroy/take over the site.

I was helping my uncle with something, and there was a website, grandmas (something), it was a gluten-free site.
Well, going there one day, I just saw a screen that said it was hacked into. warning signs, etc, yikes.
They'll hit anything.

[-<WillyP>-]

No, not competition for the word descent, we are the unrelated site being used to dilute words and links unrelated to descent.  We are just collateral damage, so to speak.  Or, in some cases, just to get links posted to a site.

[Matthew]

Sometimes spam is also to increase the pagerank of a site as well, by giving more links to and from it. All of these are reasons why it's important for a webmaster to make sure spam is removed.

[-<WillyP>-]

Right. But anyway, I was told today on another forum the answer to the captcha is 43, (as Atan and Foil corectly guessed, but I still could not get in) and that the question was a typo that was never fixed.  Good way to kill a project, make your support forum inaccessible.

[NUMBERZero]

I just saw a screen that said it was hacked into. warning signs, etc, yikes.
They'll hit anything.

I remember when PD.com got hit. The Mess Hall had a huge sign that you could not get past that said "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US." Some thought it might have been a prank from one of the other Descent forums.


That is rediculous. I went to the OP and did the math and it was 43. If they have a typo, why doesn't anyone email them something?



Matt, we should make a question for our forums:
"Who is the ultimate being?"
A. Jesus
B. Q
C. Targoss
D. Zero

Answer is obviously Zero

[Kaiaatzl]

What about Shadow?!?  "I am the ultimate lifeform even if I'm not real!"

[Alieo]

What about Jesus??? "I am the Alpha and the Omega!"

[VANGUARD]

The Lord is the Supreme Being. Without Him, we don't exist.

religious, spiritual, or whatever, I just don't understand the "zero" as an answer. I don't get it  


edit: wait a minute, after re-reading it, I'm thinking it's a joke. it's the one that really isn't even considered an appropriate answer.