This forum gets a decent amount of spam, but one of the messages today caught my eye. It looks like someone was trying to add a bit of random variety to their messages, but didn’t implement it quite right…
Remember, folks, always close your [one of] [at random] constructions (or (select) (at random) for the Dialog-users)!
Hehehehehe. Sucker.
If you do make a mistake like this E-Vehicle scammer, though, it’s important to take it in stride, fix it, and most importantly, lash out at everyone who ever points it out, saying rude and disrespectful things and threatening to hurt them or their family for ever DARING to help you fix your mistake.
Remember: Everybody owes you their utmost respect, unconditionally. If anyone says something mean to you on the Internet, you are legally allowed to violate the first amendment and threaten acts of violence.
This is a work of satire. Please don’t do this.
I haven’t seen behind this particular curtain before. Is the randomisation’s purpose to do with dodging being automatically flagged as spam? I mean, within one email, the randomisations make no difference to the reader. But does it make a difference to an individual ISP’s anti-spam tech if you send thousands of these and each one is slightly different?
-Wade
That would be my guess. But I have no idea how their system went so wrong that it just posted with the | symbols intact.
Yes. Spammers have been doing this since almost the beginning of spam history. I don’t know if it even helps them any more; there are so many spam pattern-matching signals that “thousands of identical messages going by” might not be an interesting flag. (After all, there are plenty of legitimate mailing lists that send out identical mssages.)
But criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot, I suppose.
They’ve been wearing the same pair of socks since the beginning|nascence|unveiling|birth|start of the internet too.
Reminds me of something in Catch-22:
There was nowhere else to turn but to his wife, and he scribbled an impassioned letter begging her to bring his plight to the attention of the War Department and urging her to communicate at once with his group commander, Colonel Cathcart, for assurances that—no matter what else she might have heard—it was indeed he, her husband, Doc Daneeka, who was pleading with her, and not a corpse or some impostor. Mrs. Daneeka was stunned by the depth of emotion in the almost illegible appeal. She was torn with compunction and tempted to comply, but the very next letter she opened that day was from that same Colonel Cathcart, her husband’s group commander, and began:
Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action.
Mrs. Daneeka moved with her children to Lansing, Michigan, and left no forwarding address.
Someone should make this into a Mad Libs-style Twine game
Maybe me
I was actually going to make one called The Place, with a bunch of different tables that assembled strange, dreamlike environments.
Such as a hallway with windows on both sides, a parking lot, or an empty cafe. These could be full of dirty clothes, there could be a single white truck parked in the middle. They could be well lit, have blue light dancing as if reflected from water, or full of green specks of light. Basic procedure, but mixing things together in strange ways.
I never ended up making The Place.
But asking the player to tell me things like “your favorite type of car” or “your favorite flavor of cake” and then using that in totally absurd ways (oh no! that wasn’t a real fire hydrant, it was a Oreo Ice Cream fire hydrant!) would be a very funny and Earthbound thing to do.
your favorite
[ice cream]cake
Oreo Ice Cream fire hydrant
That’s a good approach … I think the original Mad Libs were very vague about what they wanted (adjective, noun, etc.) which is kind of boring to fill in.
Asking people for specifics and then subverting what they expect (like you describe) is probably more entertaining.
(Oreo ice cream cake is a thing)
Haha, I wasn’t sure and edited my comment earlier. Apparently I ended up wrong.