Come on, who doesn’t like boots?
You may have noticed that the blog has been infiltrated by spam about buying some boots or jackets or other such nonsense. I have been diligent about deleting these posts and blocking the “users” which I assume are bots. Danielle is Queen Drupal so I’m going to put her on the case to try to fix this. We’re not going to stop allowing user comments regardless and I want to make posting comments as easy as possible. I despise those “type in the wavy letters you can’t read to log in” interfaces so I hope we don’t have to do that. I just don’t know enough about it to fix it myself so if anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears.
We do have a few other ideas peculating about the site, though…and I discovered Email!
The Google banner ads, I think, are about as non-intrusive as we can make them. I don’t even notice them, honestly, tucked down at the bottom of the pages as they are.
I want to thank everyone for sending in comments about ads, banners, and the like. It helped us a great deal. We are planning on creating a static “we recommended you buy this stuff” page which will be full of Amazon links. Brandon signed us up for the Amazon Affiliate Program. Of course you guys are free to shop wherever you want but we’ll try and pepper that page with items we all personally recommend and not random “buy some boots” links. Boardgames and PC games and console games of all stripes will be there and since it’s going to be a separate page, it shouldn’t get in the way of the front page content, which is very important to all of us. The front page of No High Scores will never be crammed with ads and buy it links. I hate that crap as much as you guys do.
We are discussing the idea of making a Cafe Press or Zazzle page, as well. If for no other reason than I’d like a No High Scores coffee mug.
Ah yes, my email discovery. Woo hoo!
For the longest time I have been checking my NHS email, thinking it was my own but instead it has been our Admin email. Upon discovering this I:
1) Felt stupid
2) Felt relieved that I may have more email than bounced back failed registration messages
Turns out that was the case. I’m going through the email this week and will reply to everyone that sent messages. Sorry about the delay — I wasn’t ignoring you.
Additionally, if you tried to register for the site and never got a password email in return it is likely in my admin Inbox. I helped one user this week fix this so if you are having issues send me an email and I’ll send you the needed password info. At last count I had about 10 of these.
Finally, we have another contest coming this week. I’m not sure how much you’ll LIKE this one, but it’s still free stuff so stop your complaining!
Finally for real this time, I want to thank everyone for sticking around these past 30 days. The site is proving more successful out of the gate than we ever expected, and while the outside referrals from sites like Penny Arcade, Dubious Quality, Flash of Steel and Quarter to Three have helped immeasurably, we have retained a lot of those users which is pretty rare in Internetland and I cannot express to each of you how much I personally appreciate that. We are steadily building a cool community here and that means a lot to each of us.
I would be fine with Captya or whatever those wavy letter things are.
They’re a lil annoying, but they seem to work well enough.
For a moment, I thought this would be a DA2 thread. I understand that Todd _loves_ that game.
I’m amused to discover that the ad for this post features really cute shoes. There’s something incredibly meta about that.
I hate them. They seem to me to be the kind of thing that stays because everyone else does it, and not because there’s a better way of doing it.
Out of interest, did anyone make any attempts to acctually BUY said boots?
I tried to read the advert and it was full of so much broken english and names for products that could almost pass as names for sexual deviancies that I just gave up.
The best ways to stop spamming I’ve found are things like requiring admin approval for the first post or something similar. The problem being how much work it requires on that side of things, as it gets tiring fairly quickly. I’ve noticed a few of the posts myself, so perhaps there’s a way of leveraging users on that score too if you check it, i.e. the report post set-up on forums as long as you don’t make it easy to accidentally click :p
The google ads I haven’t really even noticed almost at all. That is very nice, but it may defeat their purpose I’d think having a page with links to places that have the products mentioned would be the best way of doing it. Just make sure that it’s either a static page we know how to get to for recommendations that stays worth visiting or else putting links on the pages i.e. links on a ‘deals of the week’ page or when mentioning a product/linking a trainer, having a link to the amazon page for it for our convenience as well as $$ for you guys, hopefully. As long as it doesn’t pop things up or force us to go through any annoyance/extra steps against our will, it should be able to help us both.
And as long as you keep the content/reasons for visiting coming, I think you’ll keep us coming along. I like having easy access to what’s new in the comments to read or what-have-you. Not sure if as it grows more if the ‘recent comments’ will still work as well as it has or the ‘new comments’ will be as easy, but for right now it’s a very nice tool for use. As before though, as long as you’re trying (is it my imagination or has it changed from the last 5 to the last 10 posts?) it shows and it helps. Not to mention the fact you generally find the energy to personally respond to things or else someone ‘officially’ from the site does so. As much as you want to thanks us for visiting, I think we want to thank you for giving reasons to visit, so… Thanks!
I *think* the point is more to earn Google relevance than to sell anything directly from those links. I’ve seen a lot of spam re-use legitimate content and then append links on the end; I’ve even seen a few instances of it reusing spam content!
I came via Dubious Quality and subscribed to the RSS feed. I didn’t show up just to rant about Dragon Age, that’s a “happy” accident
I found a Drupal module that uses a combination of content monitoring and capcha for comments however I need Danielle to take a look before we do anything. The basic idea is that the content of the comment are scanned and if the software sees stuff that is traditionally associated with spam, it throws up a capcha field for a last minute human being check. If you’re not writing comments about boots and Viagra, you’ll never see the capcha field. If you are, and your comment is legitimate, fill out the field and you’re set. If you’re a spammer, hopefully this will stop you. If anyone has any drupal spam stopping tips, let us know and we’ll get on it.
Please please please tell me the competition is for We Dare merchandise! I saw it in Game for the Ps3 and was SO very tempted to buy it to see what the trophy list was like!
Thank you for making a blog that was good enough for us to want to keep coming back these last 30 days. I mean, I can’t speak for everyone, but I appreciate good sites like this, and if anything, we should be thank you guys for making it, not the other way around.
Keep it up, and we’ll keep looking forward to the new posts each day.
This means you received DoW?
Yep, received it a week and a half ago. It’s provided this broke returning-college student many hours of joy so far. I’ve never played a DoW game before, but this is one is definitely a good distraction.
Of course, winning the contest has nothing to do with how much I am enjoying this blog. The down to earth approach to discussing games and the gaming industry has been really refreshing. Keep it up, and I’ll be reading until you guys kick me out.
Bill, do what what needs to be done.
We will still be here. I’m just appreciative of what all of you are building. I’m always on the lookout for gaming analysis; not opinion, not reviews, but analysis, and I think your bunch is up for the task.
Thanks again from a gamer that cut his gaming teeth on a Apple ][e. (Yes Apple used to be The Gaming hardware to own.)
Now get off my joystick cord!
Well , you have a enormous alexa rank I saw that’s indicate that your site is really well-liked over the web and fortunately I discovered it on proper even though I require some real top quality content for my college project .
unsecured personal loans bad credit
Well , you’ve got a huge alexa rank I saw that’s indicate that your site is very common over the net and fortunately I discovered it on correct while I want some actual high quality content for my college project .
personal loans for bad credit