May 20, 2003
The entry that will not die

Some time ago I wrote an entry about having problems with Yahoo Messenger. It's a simple I-had-a-problem-here's-how-I-solved-it-all-good-now type entry and should have really gone mostly unnoticed.. unfortunately (for my sanity) Google indexed it and, as we all know, Google loves weblogs.. so this entry for a while now has been the number one hit for this search..... which means I get a lot of hits on it and people keep posting comments.. daily. Actually, not comments, mostly cries for help.

Few problems here.

  1. People obviously don't read before they post a comment. As far as I can tell I could have said "Leave your e-mail address and I'll sign you up for all known spam mailing lists" and they wouldn't care.

  2. Google really ought to stop loving weblogs so bloody much. Some Yahoo Messenger FAQ site should have the glory of being the number one ranked hit for that search, not my old entry that is useless to anyone but an obscure group of linux users who happen to run into the same issue I did.

  3. Weblog entries don't die. They come back to haunt you as "a comment was posted" e-mail in your inbox on daily basis.

Posted May 20, 2003 09:48 PM in Blogging
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.unix-girl.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/711
Comments
On May 20, 2003 09:56 PM Derek added:

I used to get the same thing I my "AC130 Combat Footage" blog entry. I ended up just disabling comments for that particular entry, to improve my sanity.

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On May 20, 2003 10:21 PM garrett added:

wow, those are some great comments you've got there.

i think my favorites are the ones that show up two or three times in a row because the idiot couldn't be bothered waiting for it to finish posting.

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On May 20, 2003 10:49 PM Kyle Maxwell added:

Which is precisely why I just disable comments on archive posts in my weblog... For some reason I'm one of the most popular entries searching for "learn to hack" in Google, reflected in my server logs — and the entry is about people who are getting there looking for something else! Makes me really glad that those comments are disabled. I can see it now:
PLS H3LP ME LERN TO H4CK MY FRIENDS HOTMAIL ACCT OK THX

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On May 20, 2003 11:08 PM tamaracks added:

Use Movable Type's comment close feature? That way, they can still be viewed, but not added.

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On May 21, 2003 03:17 AM gregory added:

I find it kind of funny when people keep adding comments to old blog posts. The only time I have a real issue is when they seem to go way off topic or just get annoying. I also added in the threaded comments plugin to MT, which I think helps a bit.

The ones that annoy me the most is people who just post lame things like 'THIS WEB SITE SUX0RS'. Those get deleted right away.

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On May 21, 2003 04:58 AM Spike added:

You should definitely leave it open, and add a little auto-detector that DOES sign up stupid commenters to every known spam mail list. :)

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On May 21, 2003 05:37 AM kerneljack added:

Wow, that comment listing looks like a discussion site (or forum :) for yahoo messenger. I found the entry title 'Dear Sir' amusing, well must have been a net newbie. I don't think I've ever had any problems with it though, not that I use it much anyway. Wasn't it on slashdot a few days ago that Google will probably start indexing blogs separately soon?

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On May 21, 2003 09:36 AM Dan Isaacs added:

Google "UR Gay" and see what I get on a near daily basis. :)

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On May 21, 2003 09:58 AM kasia added:

Dan, ur soo gay..

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On May 21, 2003 06:09 PM x0r added:

The comments thing feeding mails to one is annoying, especially for blogs with alot of commenting. I live parts of my life on IRC, so I created a bot there that can post when new comments are added to my site (in theory) Right now, its 'just' posting when all my friends blogs are updated. (FYI its in #BLOG (and more) on efnet)

Dan: I understand why you wonder. That blog just took a wrong turn :) Very amusing tho.


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On May 21, 2003 06:51 PM Robert added:

Thanks for posting this entry. The comments on the previous entry led me to laugh so hard I fell off my chair. I will mention - just as an aside - that falling off a chair can really hurt, particularly if you smack your bad knee (have you ever noticed when you hit your knee on something it's always your bad knee (probably not if you don't have a bad knee (unless both are bad))).

I will definitely revisit the comment list on the previous entry fairly frequently, as I found it disturbingly comforting to discover that there are people around the world using computers that are more stupid than the people around my workplace using computers.

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On May 21, 2003 10:07 PM Techie2000 added:

Hmm. Apparantly Kasia is a sir? Jeez it takes a special type of stupid person to keep posting comments to a weblog like that. They think its like a message board or help desk or something. My solution would be to have Google exclude that part from archiving with either a robots.txt or using their special code. Then you can tell Google to reindex your blog and it won't index that entry and your problem is solved...:-)

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On May 22, 2003 12:48 AM Matt added:

The blog entry about the blog entry that will not die will not die...

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On May 22, 2003 12:44 PM Arcterex added:

I have a couple of those on my ufies.org site... the biggest seems to be the "how to kill msn messanger" story (on how to stop messanger from starting up when you start outlook, and then never allowing you to kill it). The story is now full of people asking for passwords to hotmail accounts. WTF?!?!

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On May 23, 2003 06:45 AM SC added:

BTW Techie2000, The formal opening "Dear Sir" is a unisex greeting... just to be pedantic:-)

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On May 23, 2003 08:18 PM Techie2000 added:

I learned to always use a "Dear Sir or Madam" when I typed letters to someone I didn't know the gender of. I guess the rules have changed...

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On July 16, 2003 12:08 PM Bob added:

Uh, I can never figure out how to disable comments in MT. I suck. :(

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October 21, 2003 11:48 PM