Category Archives: Discourse.net

I’ve had to change a few things under the hood to fight bots sending junk trackbacks and the like.

Please drop me an email if comments or trackbacks are not working properly for you.

Something brought down my shared server today, and it had to be rebooted. Apologies for the downtime. What happened is completely opaque to both me and the tech support; the only mildly suspicious item in my recent logs is 627 recent access requests from 200.189.80.121, a Brazilian ISP. I don’t have that many readers in Brazil, as far as I know.

But that alone really shouldn’t have been enough to bring everything to a screeching halt.

Of course, it could have been something done by one of the people with whom I share the machine.

We get e-mail. Today’s seemed especially absurd. I’ve altered the domain name in the URLs and in the text, wouldn’t give them the satisfaction, but the typo was in the original:

Hi,

I manage a website called [canine]foodlist.com and I think your site would be of interest to the visitors that regularly browse my site.

I have gone ahead and given you a link plus a description of your site from my page at http://[canine]foodlist.com/metalautomaticdogfoodfeeder and I’m just contacting you to check it is ok to have done this for you?

I would greatly appreciate a link back to my site and if you are happy to do this then to make it easy for you I have included the following code…

Dog Food List Everything about dog food from best dog food to wysong dog food.

Feel free to change the suggested code if you would like to. I look forward to a mutually beneficial link partnership and I wish you all the best with your site for the future. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.

Kind regards

Greg

P.S. Keep up the good work!

Disclaimer: If this email has reached you in error or if you would not like to be contacted again then please accept my sincere apologies. Let me know by sending an email to remove@[canine]foodlist.com if this is the case and I will make sure [canine]foodlist.com never contacts you again.

//

Dog Food?!? I’m not even chopped liver???

It’s probably been almost two years since I last looked at discourse.net’s listing at blogshares. Shortly after registering there I decided this wasn’t a game I was going to play, and more or less forgot about it without doing any transactions.

On a whim I looked at blogshare’s discourse.net listing over the weekend, and found lots of strange stuff.

Can anyone please explain the meaning of multiple “press releases” by people I don’t know that sound like the following,

Discourse.net suffered a huge setback with several analysts urging their clients to ditch the stock as it suffered a public relations disaster. The exact nature of customer dissatisfaction was not known but sara bear was rumoured to have had a hand in it. Industry insiders suspect a Star Spangled Banner (artefact) was involved. Discourse.net share price dropped from B$56,734.68 to B$32,906.11

sara bear declined to comment on the recent speculation.

“Huge setback”? “(artefact)”? “customer dissatisfaction”? And, how did one Matt Williams come to have what seems to be a controlling interest of 71.2%? Did I sell shares without noticing?

Not that I suppose it actually matters…

Apparently, as law blogs go — if this is a true law blog any more than Is That Legal? which gets excluded — discourse.net is a popular blog (by all measures).

As I noted in a private comment to the original count at Opinio Juris, I think we should not take these measures too seriously. For one thing, they ignore readers via RSS feeds; I know many of you, like me, read most blogs via a newsreader. (FeedBurner claims there are about 750 850 of you, but that’s just an estimate.) I give a full text news feed because I prefer readers to hit counts. If counts matter — and why exactly do they matter? Isn’t writing style, or quality of ideas what we in the academy should be praising in our top 10 lists? — one might, for example, want to at least distinguish between blogs with a full text feed and those without.

However these words find you, thanks again for a few minutes in your busy day.