Help me fight Forum Spam

[Crunchyfrog]

Jeez. Sev should appoint a moderator to get rid of all that stuff!

I guess all we can do is camp out here now. Yeah, I'd appreciate an extended deadline too... I have been struggling to finish another project before getting on to this one - probably a foolish decision, but I wanted to have a clear mind to give my IWT entry the best shot.

[mizal]

Tisk, tisk, sounds like we have procrastinators here. (Just so glad it's not me for once. )

I wouldn't mind an extension though, more time might let me add actual 'choose your own' elements to my adventure. I admit that right now there are a few more incidents of "Oh, you want to do something different? Well fuck you then, you're dead" than I'm really happy with.

Also, UPDATE on my logging in adventures: yesterday it worked for a little while, today it does not. Clearing or not clearing my cache and cookies doesn't seem to have any noticeable effect, thus, like I said, magic. It may seem completely random NOW, but I have a theory that if I burn just the right combination of leaves during a certain phase of the moon while putting on a puppet show with severenz dolls, it will let me in again! I'll let you all know how it goes.

[Ryan_DuBois]

Yes, I think when (and if) Sev comes back we should definitely ask him to give moderating privileges to someone who frequents the site at least once every couple weeks. Dragavan would probably be ideal, if he wanted to be a mod, since he seems to get in the fewest flame wars.

And, apart from LadyXAdmin, we could also get rid of that Megaman bot that's been spamming the site for years now.

Anyway.

Yeah, I procrastinated. During college I have an excuse: since I'm apparently not as smart as I thought I was in high school, I have to dedicate almost all of my spare time to reading textbooks/working on programs. And even then I'm only able to get like one or two As per semester.

But during my breaks I've also been taking it easy and hanging out with friends rather than writing. I just can't focus -- my head is too full of entertaining memes, I suspect. Viruses of the mind.

My only real goal is to get 20 rooms, though (although I'm hoping for around 40). After the contest, I think I'll continue (slowly) working on our story anyway, just so that I can say I'm still contributing to the site. I don't really want to enter next year, although I've been known to join just about every IWT that I'm around for.

[Locke]

Yes, I think when (and if) Sev comes back we should definitely ask him to give moderating privileges to someone who frequents the site at least once every couple weeks. Dragavan would probably be ideal, if he wanted to be a mod, since he seems to get in the fewest flame wars.

Agreed, as to the need for a moderator (and Dragavan does have that DM experience to recommend him), but it could really be anyone these days. IS has calmed down considerably, I think (well, I grew up a little, and Ves left, as did MRH and Drums). Even Chubby seems slightly more sober. For awhile I thought we were rid of Megaman, too, but he's okay now. Kind of like a mascot.

Also, UPDATE on my logging in adventures: yesterday it worked for a little while, today it does not. Clearing or not clearing my cache and cookies doesn't seem to have any noticeable effect, thus, like I said, magic. It may seem completely random NOW, but I have a theory that if I burn just the right combination of leaves during a certain phase of the moon while putting on a puppet show with severenz dolls, it will let me in again! I'll let you all know how it goes.

I find it helps to call the circle together and sacrifice a goat to Severenz under the full moon. I'm not saying this will work for you, but I've had good luck with it whenever I try to log in. I burn printouts of his early announcements from the forum while I do this, chanting my pleas for access and spambot removal, hoping the ritual will appease him.

[Ryan_DuBois]

I've been thinking about that lately, too... All the excitement has really died down over the last one or two years. And yes, at this point I'd trust almost anyone who frequents as a moderator.

With the obvious exception of Megaman.



Actually, I can see DEP or Chubby abusing it for their own amusement, too, but at least in their cases we'd get some entertainment out of the whole ordeal.

[End Master]

Sev said once he only really trusted Drag to be a mod, but Drag didn't want the job. Of course there was a lot more drama going on at that time, (In that very thread actually) and it is true things have become more peaceful since then.

I haven't even seen Drag log on here for a couple months now, I think he disappeared for other internet adventures. (or real ones)

Ves actually still lurks around here since her stories will sometimes disappear and reappear on the main story list every so often. She's also got Yazzman (Ryan?) listed as a new friend on her main site profile as well.

[Ryan_DuBois]

Haha, I thought no one would notice. Very rarely do people pay attention to the friend list on the main site. But yeah, me and Ves ended up hooking up a couple weeks ago, so I thought it was only appropriate to add her as my "friend". Didn't want anyone to know, but apparently not even an innocent friend request can escape EndMaster's lidless eye.

Okay, not really. But I probably had some of you going, eh?



Anyway, yeah, Ves and Shabti are both still hanging around on the main site. I haven't actually talked to them, but I got bored and sent out a bunch of friend requests to everyone a couple weeks ago, and (oddly enough) those two were the first ones to accept. Then again, pretty much everyone who leaves enjoys checking in on this site regularly (even I would read the forums every couple months or so during my absence, since they were so amusing), so I'm not all that surprised.

Hopefully they'll rejoin the forums someday. Also: I miss homerpython. We rarely saw eye-to-eye, but he DID try to defend me the time CelticFrostQueen threw a fit and got me banned. That was pretty nice of him. He's one of the few who actually might never return, though.

[End Master]

EndMaster's lidless eye.

It actually wouldn't have surprised me if you'd hooked up with Ves, she is a "friendly" girl after all. (Ha ha)

Yeah, homer (or jeff) was okay. I thought his sense of humor was sort of odd though, since I never quite understood why he thought my Ebay story was the funniest thing ever, but hated Trash. Hell, I thought Ebay was so weak that I actually went back to support it with two funnier stories and renamed the thing.

[Ryan_DuBois]

So I've heard.



Yes, Homer/Jeff was a little odd. My best guess as to why he didn't like "Trash" would be the excessive swearing/sex/drug-use (not sure if there was actually any drug use, come to think of it, but I know the main character was a drunk). "Ebay" just had the swearing (at least for the most part). It always seemed to get on his nerves when people talked about the "dirtier" aspects of the world we live in, even though he kept telling us about... stuff we didn't necessarily want to hear.

Nice guy, though. Did he ever say why he was leaving?

[EDIT]

Oh my God! It's THE EYE!

[End Master]

I'd sort of understand that, but it doesn't really explain why he liked Chubby's Crack Attack though which was basically like Trash except with a crackhead protagonist rather than an alcoholic one.

Meh, like I said he was okay, but I just sort of found him a little inconsistent on certain things. Like he'd scold people for joking about sex stuff (claiming it drove away new forum members), then he'd make posts about how he jacked off A LOT. (And he wasn't joking about it either)

As for him leaving, I think one of his last posts was he was getting bored and he was going to write another novel. (He posted some short story he wrote on his website) Sort of figured he'd pop in again at some point, but I guess not.

[Usoki]

I was gonna say... I feel like the moderator thing has come up before... Drag is the only one who really qualifies, but he doesn't want it. I don't remember much else about the issue, or how it all ended, but I do remember EndMaster modifying his avatar so that the word 'moderator' was written across the bottom.

And of course End still 'remembers' all of these things. I'm still convinced that he keeps a Word Document with all of our names in it, which he updates with all of our personal information so that he can keep track of it all. Whenever we throw out some random detail about ourselves in a random, off-topic thread? Boom, recorded for later use, in case it ever comes up again.

I don't often slip in real life details, but I'm pretty sure End knows my home state, possibly my home town, the time I posted my Halloween costume, and probably two or three other things I don't even remember saying, but which are true. But it's all good, I guess. Incidentally, my shoe size is a 10 1/2 Wide.

I'd forgotten about Jeff. I'd finally managed to repress him. I guess he was okay, but I just never liked him much. Most of his work had a lot of promise, but was ultimately too shallow to really be interesting, his personality was more chameleon than anything distinct... and he kept trying to champion really dumb causes. My favorite was, when we were making the map for DEP's fantasy thing, he kept insisting that my interpretation of Drevlin was wrong, even though I was the one that created it in the first place. And he kept trying to misquote my own words against me. Mostly, my memory of him is biased because of that incident. I mean, for fuck's sake...

[Locke]

We rarely saw eye-to-eye, but he DID try to defend me the time CelticFrostQueen threw a fit and got me banned.

This was before my time. How did you get banned from an IS forum?

...and he kept trying to champion really dumb causes.

Nothing beats Drums and the child sex robots.

EDIT: Well, there was all the Mega stuff, but I can't remember a coherent cause anywhere in that, except some vague stuff about 4chan.

[Ryan_DuBois]

Usoki: Yeah, I don't know. I just like the fact that he tried to help me stay on the site (so I'm biased the other way). Though I'd be first to agree that in some areas he might not have had... common sense? He used to always rate my stories less whenever I had a single "choice" linking two rooms, saying that I should always combine them into one.

And End... The man's mind was built for storing forum details (in particular, any juicy personal information that people let slip). No way I could remember all the stuff he does, and he's probably like 5 - 10 years older. Why does he do it? Well, this is just a hunch, but I'd say there's a fair chance that he's going to start picking us off one-by-one any day now.

Wait a second... So that's what happened to Jeff! He kept telling us everything about his personal life and it wasn't very long before End was able track him down! His "mom" probably picked him up from soccer practice one day and that was the end of him. Dear God.

Although we actually do have one piece of info against End in turn: his real name. Thank God Katie accidentally mentioned it, or we wouldn't even have that.

Actually, I think I know most people's names at this point:

End - Max
Apoth - Zach?
DEP - Ben?
Chubby - Jacob
Locke - Tom
Hi! My Name is: Katie - Not sure
Usoki - Not sure, but it's probably something sophisticated. Like "William". He seems like a William.
Xnull - Not sure
MRH - Michael
Cat2000 - Not sure
Crunchy - Not sure
Mizal - Not sure
Smeester - Not sure
Dragavan - Not sure
homerpython: Jeff
severenz - Not sure, but I know I've heard it before. I think it's only one syllable.
Ves - Not sure
Shabti - Not sure

Okay, never mind. I don't know as much as I thought I did.

Locke: It was way back in 2004 or 2005, when me and the original owner of the "YazZMaN" account were like 14. Megaman was around back then and (since the site was a lot smaller) he used to always send out PMs to the newcomers saying things like:

"hi your story was good but the swearing is bad. im 12 how old are you?"

Everyone knew he was trouble. Anyway, I got one of these PMs and I showed it to my good friend YazZ, since we had both already seen and laughed at his comments on peoples' stories. Around that time we had started a group in the old "Clan Section" of IS (but back then the site was known as "CYOA" for "Choose Your Own Adventure"). Can't remember all the details of our group, but YazZ thought it would be amusing to add the disclaimer:

"Absolutely no gays allowed under ANY circumstances!"

(To keep Megaman out, he said.)

We didn't think much of it. All I knew for like a year was that when I tried to get on IS, I kept getting directed to this blank page that said something like "Shape by Force" on it.

Over that year I kept getting ideas for the CYOA called "ExShin", and I wanted to write it really bad. Eventually, I came back to the site, but this time I used YazZ's account (since we knew each others' passwords and he didn't really come to the site after he stopped working on "When Zombies Attack"). It worked. I wrote "ExShin" and after DEP read it, he said it was good and that I should join the forums, so I did. It was fun. I had flame wars with just about everyone on the site back then, but it was a good community. Didn't write much after "ExShin".

So about a year or two down the road, EndMaster (I think). Dug up an old thread that showed CelticFrostQueen writing about how offensive me and YazZ's group was. Jeff tried to defend me, since I knew him a little bit at that point (from off the forums -- we rated each others stories a bit and discussed writing in general). It didn't work, though, since CFQ (along with NCPolice) was one of the unofficial "forum leaders" from back before I had joined. Of course, they probably were the best writers in their day, so it makes sense that they were role models for the young aspiring writers.

Anyway, Sev had banned me over it. That explained why I couldn't log on to my old account ("Karold") a few years earlier (YazZ didn't get banned because he was only a member the group -- Karold/I was listed as the group leader or whatever). To this day, I don't think he knows I'm not actually the real YazZ. I like to think he wouldn't mind, though.

How's that for a nice, boring bit of history?



[EDIT]

Oh, and speaking of Drums... There's a quest in "Fallout: New Vegas" he would have liked...

[DOUBLE EDIT]

And my shoe size is the same as Usoki's. Sometimes I go for the 11s, though. Sometimes I go for the 11s.

[End Master]

Hey I can't help it, it's the archivist in me. That's pretty much what my real job consists of, keeping track of a bunch of obscure or pointless crap so I can find it for other people in the off chance that they need it for research or something.

Ryan: Lol, Katie's name is pretty obvious.

I forgot Xnull's name, but Apoth mentioned it in a thread somewhere in this very forum I believe. Shabti's mentioned his name on here before, forgot it too. I think he even linked to his myspace page once which gave a bunch of info. Sev's real name is on his other website I think.

I know Drag and Ves real names, but I won't mention them since they didn't volunteer the information for public release. At least I think I know Ves real name, she did seem sort of agitated and surprised when I mentioned it directly to her. Hey, not my fault she let it slip once in a chat!

Usoki's been about the only current long standing active forum member who has managed to keep his real name secret and not have anyone else let it slip. But he posted his pic on Halloween and I know he lives in Kansas so he's done for anyway. (I actually don't know his hometown so it'll still take awhile. Lol)

Speaking of banning, Chubby's the only person on here than managed to get himself banned on here several times due to his multiple account disorder. (And his "lovable" obnoxious behavior may have also played a part) How Megaman avoided getting banned I'll never know since he was pissing off people even back in the day when NCPolice, Celtic, KAG, Shabti and Sev were all frequent posters and active.

EDIT: Anyone else finding the spambot's advertisement titles a little amusingly contradictory at times? One moment it's trying to sell us viagra, next it's telling us how viagra causes heart attacks. Recently it's been trying to sell "healthy cigarettes".

Still surprised it hasn't started shilling sex toys yet though. After going through loans, savings, credit, gambling, prescription drugs, and cigs I'm sure the "Mr. Big Dick Cream" porn spam links will be showing up soon.

[Ryan_DuBois]

Ryan: Lol, Katie's name is pretty obvious.

I know; I was trying to throw in some subtle humor.

I know Drag and Ves real names, but I won't mention them since they didn't volunteer the information for public release. At least I think I know Ves real name, she did seem sort of agitated and surprised when I mentioned it directly to her. Hey, not my fault she let it slip once in a chat!

I'm impressed that anyone knows Dragavan's real name.