I just deleted two thousand, four hundred sixty-six spam posts from the moderation queue. Now before you go getting annoyed at DJ for never using the tools readily at his disposal, consider that if I hadn’t personally skimmed through 2400-someodd repetitions of “HI I AM LIKING UR SITE! I REWARD YOU WITH SKEEZY LINK TO TEH BOOBIES” and “GET HERBAL VIAGRA FOR YOUR SEX SLAVE”, I might never have discovered the following gems. Both exhibit marketing strategies never before seen, and still not entirely understood, by me. Both are considerably above the median for basic English competency, a fact that simultaneously relieves and perturbs me. And, in the spirit of Penny Arcade’s less-than-annual “We’re Right” Awards, I declare that the following are worthy to be called SPAM OF THE YEAR.

Not only that; as a reward for their thoughtfulness and originality, I’m giving these spammers a chance to make actual money for the shadowy interests they serve. Pro-bono for street cred works great in the software industry, so why not spam? “Hey, d’you hear what happened to Fred? He got hired as a top marketing exec for SketchCo after their sales inexplicably skyrocketed.” “Damn, that kid musta been one crufty spammer.” It works like this. I show you the spam text, minus all links and references to SketchCo. Then I give you a legit link to a Google search phrase, however sketchy that phrase. If interested parties do the search, and SketchCo turns up in the results, then SketchCo’s investment in Fred has paid off. Right? Of course it’s right. You wouldn’t question the logic of it if I were to hang Fred’s paintings in an art gallery, would you?

But enough ado… let’s hear it for the RUNNER-UP!! This one was singled out by our judges for its informative coverage of timely and controversial issues, and for the exciting plot twists that keep you guessing as to what’s actually being advertised.

Hi to everyone !!!
The Essential Change and the Iranian banner
Members of the first and the minute Iranian Parliaments, formed after Mozafarodin Monarch Qajar given the constitutionalists the rights they were seeking, definite in the Piece 5 of the constitution: “the beadle colors of the Iranian colours are green, white, and carmine along with the lioness and the star signs.” No details were ambitious as to the plural of these colors or the there of the signs.
This dearth of specifications was partly merited to the existence of some Muslim clergies in the Parliament, who would regard using any moving mortal against the Islam. The profane MPs had to hotel to some long justifications to disarm the fundamentalist MPs to finally formalise the clause. Green, as the choice tincture of Islam, carmine a laurels of the humor of martyrs, and individual the comprehensive accolade of armistice and the selection tincture of the Zoroasterianism, the ancient vigil of the pre-Islamic Iran were colloquialism ratified.
References were also made to the momentousness Iranian mortal fixate to the week of Mordad, similar to Asad in Syrian organisation and Leader Ali’s heading (“Asadullah”, the cat of God).
In 1957 (1336 H.J.), Manouchehr Ighball, the maturity clergyman of the time, issued a leading environment standards for the flag’s call measurements.
The Iranian banner in the Outstation Islamic-Revolution Age Column 18th of the Law of the Islamic Republic of Iran, passed on in 1979 (1358 H.J.) states: “The bailiff colors of the Islamic Republic of Iran is dignified of green, individual and carmine colors with the dish colors of Islamic Republic in the midfield together with the motto”. click here and read more
%0D%0AIran Flag
What is the statesmanlike (George W Bush) receptor color? The feedback is simple: You can activity collage with George W Papooseroot is Anticyclone Resolution. Here is the blueprint ascension with George W Shrubbery eye:
Can anyone explain? What is next? * George W Barberry Chain Size? * George W Shrubbery Area Size? * George W Papooseroot Pick Diet Soda?
I am one of those who are unusual at what is the Presidentship George W. Bush’s ocellus color? To feedback my curiosity, by googling what is the statesmanlike stemma heather on Google, I immediately got the answer, Presidency George W. Barberry peeper tint is …click and see:
%0D%0Ageorge w bush eye color

Legit links (no ad revenues generated by clicking):

• Google search for “iran flag”
• Google search for “george w bush eye color”

Based on the results of the first search, one might guess that this spammer is under the thumb of the evil WikiMedia Foundation, since Wikipedia is the top result. Or not. The second search returned a lot more skeezy results, in addition to some unremarkable ones.

But you ain’t seen nothing yet. Check out our GRAND CHAMPION of 2007!! This one has a great family-friendly message, packages it up cleanly and concisely, and delivers it in a feel-good way without patronizing.

Save time by hitting.
divorce divorce
[snip url] divorce [/url] [snip url] divorce [/url]
…

Now, don’t you just feel great after that? Anyway, this one probably needs some help, because it depends so much on context. I’m just going to go out on a limb here, and say what they wanted was:

Legit link: Google search for “divorce lawyers”

Now, this search leads us to scads of interesting hits, some of which could perhaps be a front for SketchCo. Which brings us to what is perhaps the winningest aspect of our winningest spam: even if you ran the search yourself, results are scattered in such a way that you don’t know whom to trust. If you have a good eye, you might notice Google’s sponsored links on this search are noticeably more respectable-looking than the rabble, but even then, the initial moment of confusion is a gap through which SketchCo can try to slip.

Thanks for tuning in everybody. One last round of applause for these two enterprising young jerks!

First off, if you posted a comment in the last month and you think I’m hating on you, I’m not. I was hating on everybody by totally neglecting site management. Bad DJ. But as of this moment, I’m getting caught up for at least a while. Anyway, it’s okay! You’ll be excited by all the variety I pack into this one excuse for a recap.

1. I is bachelur. For the next month and a half, at least. No major cataclysm, just some time off. We managed to celebrate the holidays together before that (on the 21st, with my roommates), which was totally great.

2. BLOGTASTIC! JavaScriptKids is getting a blog. I was really hesitant to do this, until I convinced myself that it could be done, essentially from scratch, with the right knowledge (mmmm, tastes like Structured Query Language). So in a nutshell that’s what I decided to do. Thus far, 95% of the work is done on the server, in PHP, but I’m thinking about ways of *safely* exposing more raw blogging power to JavaScript so you script kids can meddle with it. This is all just in time, too – Kelcy got me awesome license plate holders, including one with the site address on it.

3. Questionable Content has once again vaulted to #1 on my favorite comics (with XKCD, Penny Arcade, Toothpaste For Dinner and Dr McNinja probably rounding out the top 5. Top ten seems less interesting, because I don’t really read more than ten). While it is known and understood that nobody else packs quite the same combo of culture-savvy wit and walloping raunchiness, this most recent string of episodes takes the cake. It’s kind of like a diabolical Gen-X answer to Friends. It’s also a perfect paradox: you’d totally want your S.O.’s family to be cool like the Bianchis, and yet simultaneously, NEVER, EVER WANT THAT. DEAR LORD.

4. I Want Rock Band. Basically that would be, Guitar Hero on steroids, on the off-chance you’re familiar with the one but not the other. It was already clear to me that Guitar Hero was not the way to go after watching Yahtzee tear the latest one to pieces on Zero Punctuation reviews. Less clear was who these Harmonix people were, and what they had going for them, until MathWorks managed to nab the lead developers for a tech talk.

Now I not only know a lot more about the game and what’s in it (everything! everything! voice! guitar! bass! drums! it’s madness! okay, so the guitar and bass are actually both a guitar, whatever); I’m rather awed by some of the technology, and what went into making it work on the lowest common denominator of gaming systems, the PlayStation 2. It’s not just technology, of course; the Harmonix people are like techno-funky artistes with an ear for style. They need to be; the fun and usability of the entire game rides on it. If ever there was a dream job for musically inclined hackers, it’d be at a place like that.

5. Games-ahoy! On an unequivocally related topic, I finally got the Orange Box (and while I was at it, a 360 to play it on, and Halo 3 to go with that–y’know, just for the hell of it). Halo, which suffers badly from Microsoft “user-friendly”, was finished without a whole lot of ceremony–whoopdee, trilogy done, no more beguiling loose ends–and subsequently I dived into Orange Box, the compilation from Valve. I won’t go into too much detail on Portal, save to say that it’s pretty much everything the critics praised it for, and over about as quickly as they said it would be (GLaDOS, come back to meeeeeeee!).

After that, Half Life is a jarring contrast. Considerably harder than its predecessor, only less forgiving with ammo, the early trench fighting seemed to last forever, and I must confess that even though I survived it, Ravenholm broke my spirit. No sooner had I completed the notorious zombie-infested level, and reached sweet daylight, than I ran smack into Overwatch troops with heavy assault weapons, and suddenly the fun had gone out of the game. I’m sure I’ll pick it back up eventually, sometime when I feel more like watching my character lose a Chinese army’s worth of blood whilst berserking. Because it is still such a pretty game. And I miss Dog.

Team fortress looks kinda nice. Who wants to lend me the 3 controllers Microsoft neglected to provide to me for team play?

6. Work – still doing the same stuff at MathWorks. Still loving it. Working on making a permanent gig out of it; stay tuned for more on that.