Bad Bot
Bots that are no smarter than the people who program them
We get pitches from people all the time to review their products on our blog, or add their affiliate link. What’s consistently obvious in all of them is that the person doing the pitch has never actually read our blog.
Still, they keep pouring in. We used to just delete them unanswered. But, where’s the fun in that? We decided it was high time we repaid the courtesy. If they take the time to scrape our email address and send a form letter, we ought to take a moment to reply.
Jeremy Kates, from Web2Carz.com, wrote:
Hi Blog Owner,
I was looking over your blog, and I think you would greatly benefit from our FREE used car search sidebar widget for Wordpress. The search results are embedded inline on your sidebar (AJAX) without sending the user away. In addition, you can become an affiliate and earn extra money for any auto loan referrals.
Obviously they’ve read all the comments on our blog where people are saying, “Hey, I like your blog, but where are the used car ads? Every blog is better with used car ads! Bring them on!”
His email goes on about how they pay a whopping $4 per lead, which is awesome, since cars cost thousands of dollars, so naturally, $4 is a huge commission. He even says, If nothing else, it offers another way to siphon some revenue from visitors on their way out. That’s the ticket. “As long as you’re leaving anyway, wanna buy a car?” Here’s Jeremy’s email
Here’s our reply.
Hi Jeremy,
Thank you so much for your email! Most of the people who read my blog are alcoholics who have had their licenses suspended because they’ve had too many DUI’s. Have you thought about creating a plugin for calling cab companies? Most of the bars around here have wifi, so that would be really handy. And, if you include an option to click for bus routes, I think that would just about cover all their needs.
Thanks again for thinking of me!
Fail Bird Handler
Twitter-Fail.com
The only things more prolific than tribbles are spammers and bots on twitter. We have to hurry and write this post, because if we keep trying to find all the accounts belonging to GP Schaefer, we’ll never finish. Every time we do another search just to make sure we have them all, we find another one.
So far, we have: @CougarMtnSw_OE @bMobileTech @CougarMtn24x7 @CougarMtnGuru @OutgrowingQB @BusinessListsUS @Business_Lists @acctg2000 @CougarMtnSW_IN @phonesuport @ReportWriter @PDFBlaster @CougarMTNSW @eMailLists @Peachtreesw @LivewarePub @quickbookssw @SWoutfitters @crystalguru @COUGARMTN @MyController @CMStotheMAX
Flushing out all these dupes was so easy, we almost feel sorry for ol’ GP. Kind of like hunters in (insert whichever US state you think is most hillbilly) who drive through the fields shooting from the open window of their Ford F150, it wasn’t even sporting. Opening all the accounts in the same name was the big tip-off. The clincher was both the retweets from one account to the next, and the following lists. GP likes to follow himself around. You can’t get lonely when me, myself and I = 22.
Of course, GP could have saved himself the trouble, and spent his time creating one twitter account and making a few friends. Wait – who are we kidding? With all the twitter crap apps around, it takes no time at all to create a bunch of accounts and have them follow each other, or a bunch of random people. The crap apps will also generate your tweets for you, so you never have to actually use twitter in the way it was intended. Since twitter is free, why should anyone care how many resources they waste?
Because it isn’t going to be free forever, buddy. Somebody has to pay the bills.
Twitter already shows little, unobtrusive ads, and it won’t end there. Eventually, they will have to get serious about monetizing. All those jerks who are wasting twitters resources will make that happen sooner, rather than later.
Something we learned from Star Trek: Little problems grow into big problems.
Another thing we learned from Star Trek: A virus in their food supply killed the tribbles. Just saying.
(that was a joke. an attempt at humor. jeez.)