No, not THAT naughty! I mean, doing naughty things (or wanting to do naughty things) – as in: bad things.
It sometimes surprises me when I peruse the search terms for both old and new blogs, just how many people want to do nefarious things within SL. Much of the time they want to spy on someone (probably suspecting their partner is cheating) or hide from someone, but I thought I’d dedicate a post to some of the search terms that pop up from time to time.
Hop behind the cut :)
I found the following gem nestling within the Askimet folder of the main blog, and I’ve only just finished rolling around with laughter after reading it:
Hello I am so cock-a-hoop I initiate your snare instal, I unqualifiedly found you via misfortune, while I was looking on Aol for something else, Anyways I am here in the present climate and would just like to put thanks quest of a mythical post and a all tour moving blog (I also inclination the theme/design), I don’t have time to understand it all at the jiffy but I cause saved it and also added in your RSS feeds, so when I set up time I inclination be destroy to look over more, Please do shut in up the tremendous being done.
Nope. Clearly not done laughing yet! Thank you, blabliblo6! XD
Oh, and here’s another (much shorter) gem, courtesy of isonsisee:
You will come thru it, believe me
Now I dont have to feel so intimated by science! this the world is your oysterÂ
It’s like The Tao of Spam. Oh hey… someone should curate that book!
Something rather odd has been happening in the search terms of the old blog (which I still check for the Those Little Questions series). There seems to be a strange and sudden increase in people wanting to know… well, see for yourselves:
– sl viewer 2 how to know someone looks at me
– how to find out if someone is looking at your profile second life
– second life know what others are looking at
– can people in second life know if your seeing them?
– can you tell if people look at your profile in sl
– how to know if someone is camming you on secondlife
– can someone tell if i look at their profile on sl
And that’s just in the last week. Usually a plethora of sudden and new search terms like this is indicative of something happening somewhere (for example: when Linden Lab introduced Basic Mode as the default mode for new viewer downloads the blog received an unprecedented flurry of people wanting to know where their inventory had gone and how to get it back). I don’t know if the old rumour that “omg people can tell if you’re reading their profile!” has been sent out in a large group, or if something to do with avatar privacy has been blogged about or asked on the official Forums or SL Answers. But something is up, because I don’t usually get a sudden increase in specific questions like that without a reason.
If you’re here to find out the answers to those questions, then it used to be possible to see if someone was looking at you (aka: camming onto you) by enabling Show Look At in the Advanced menu of your viewer. I think (don’t quote me, because I don’t run that viewer) that this ability was removed from Viewer 2. However, also, many third party viewers have settings that allow you to not show your avatar’s “looking at” crosshairs, so there’s no guarantee that the avatar halfway across the store from you isn’t checking you out anyway. They’re probably admiring your outfit or maybe inspecting your hair to find out where you got it from, because they like it so much. Please don’t get defensive and send accusing IMs to them, demanding that they stop looking at you. Take it as a compliment instead!
To the best of my knowledge, though, there is no way for any avatar to tell if you’re reading their profile, either in-world or on the website.
sl4nowt.com has just had its first spam comment! The old WordPress blog regularly got tons of them, but this is my first one here!
*wipes away a tear and sniffs* I feel like a proud mama ;)
(Um, it goes without saying, because I know my readers aren’t dumb, but please don’t go trying to check out those links…)
The Askimet stats for the old SL for Nowt blog have proved to be interesting reading. WordPress no longer provides Askimet for its free hosted blogs, and I’ll bet I could tell you exactly when they withdrew it. Take a look at this:
Going way back, the blog received between 100 and 250 spam comments per month. But look at the rise that begins in September of 2010: a third again. And in October over half again. It stays steady during November, and then in December? WHAM.
I would hate to be a free WordPress user right now, as my blog (with its Askimet protection, which WordPress have thankfully not taken away from its blog community veterans) is receiving tens of spam comments per day (over 300, as you can see, in the first ten days of January this year). Askimet is catching all of these (it did miss one today, but sent it into my moderation queue because the commenter was new to the blog. The linked email address of the commenter was trying to sell insurance, even though his [ slightly nonsensical ] comment was bland and passable).
Trying to wade your way through that mass of spam comments without Askimet? *shudder*
Since I’ve not posted on the main (old) blog for a few days, the number of referrers has gone down. However, when I checked just who those referrers were, I got pretty disheartened.
There is a depressing trend for what I call ‘scrounger sites’ that scour the net for any and all articles about a specific word, then post links to them. Mar could post about a second Life gadget, and it will be linked to on a RL gadgets scrounger site. A post about the Second Life Hair Fair will be linked to alongside tons of other RL hair links on another scrounger site.
So, instead of other SL bloggers linking to me, more and more I see the blog being linked to by completely bizarre and unrelated scrounger sites.
Hop behind the cut for a screenshot of today’s referrer stats for the main blog.