I think it turned out to be a boojum.

This put me in mind to propose a new comments metagame: given an amusing comment, suggest the hypothetical presumed-to-have-been-deleted spam message that it might have been in response to.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how one could go about playing this game without accidentally running afoul of your actual spamcatchers, and the risk of being autoassigned to some spammer blacklist makes me hesitant to try. Regardless of how funny my response to the above might have been.

...Wow. That sends my mind in circles. Now I really grok the Catch-22 of all that's profane: one cannot speak against it, even to ridicule it, without profaning oneself in turn.

RWA issued a fatwah against Filthy Smut late last week, complete with list of banned words. No RWA-affiliated website may link to any website containing those words, nor to any website which is itself clean but links to another website containing those words. The text of the fatwah is on the RWA website (or so I'm told, I haven't gone to look). Naturally, many erotic romance writers had much fun this weekend blogging about the logical result...

Back to the original topic--yes, Patrick's got a point. I have in the past seen a couple of "Look! Spam!" posts that looked like snarky comments about the previous legitimate post in the thread. I resolved to try to make my own "Look! Spam!" comments more clearly worded. I hope I've succeeded.

It's rather like what I keep banging on about in my rants on various public forums about the importance of government, taxes, rule of law, and assorted artificial infrastructure (social & physical) as well as the natural environmental foundation we so seldom notice. The better it is, the less we tend to notice it.
Once it gets bad enough to get people aggravated enough to do something, it usually takes an awful lot to get back to "normal" (if possible at all).

Maybe another example is age or disease affecting your body. Until I lost various bits of it, I hadn't felt really deeply the happiness inherent in bodily comfort & ease of use.

1) indicating spam that, significantly, may or may not exist,
2) bears no direct resemblance to, nor carries any overtones of, anything snarkish, and
3) is sufficiently rare that it will not be misinterpreted as anything with more than meta-spam value.

As I can think of no word that meets said qualifications, I feel confident we shall have to co-opt an existing one. I propose "anglet", for I feel anglet is a ridiculous word that should never be used for its intended purpose.

Thus, comments such as, "Beware the bit of anglet above," or, "That looks like a load of anglets to me," should never be read as anything other than a helpful bit of post that points out the (one-time) existence of spam.

It showed a rather bleak waiting room with many empty chairs. In one was a lone middle-aged man in a cloth cap, looking nervous & staring rather desperately off into the distance. He was facing away from a huge notice taking up most of the back wall saying, more or less:

"READING THIS NOTICE IS FORBIDDEN."

Here's the fatwah itself, cleaned up so RWA members can still link to Making Light:

'With respect to all RWA programs and services, the following shall not be depicted or represented: exposed male and female genitalia, exposed female nipples, cunnilingus and fellatio, hands or mouth covering naked female breasts, naked or g-string-clad buttocks, and bestiality. The following words: c*ck, c*cksucker, c*nt, f*ck, motherf*cker, sh*t, and t*t, will not be displayed.'

It's an interesting list of banned words... are they going to prevent sites from discussing common garden birds?

As an aside, I noticed this (contains uncensored variants of the words above) while searching for that phrase -- it probably explains the choice of words.

Glory in finding bugs? Indeed!

Perhaps the bug reports should be required to be in this author's terse, compact style. :)
R.

Glory?

I'm reminded of a New Year's Eve themed restaurant shown in an episode of "The Simpsons."

An enchanted Marge tells a waiter how wonderful it must be to work in a place where it is New Years every fifteen minutes.

He mutters in reply: "Kill me."

Well, yes, if I did it for a living I'd feel differently about it. I used to think having "root" on a unix system was cool, too, until I became responsible for 35 servers!

I mostly beta-test graphics apps in exchange for a copy of the app or a discount - it tends to become a friendly competition among the testers to see who can break the app the most comprehensively.