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 Administrative / General / 2825
2824  |  2826
Subject: 
automatically appended taglines
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Wed, 8 Sep 1999 21:53:10 GMT
Viewed: 
159 times
  
In lugnet.robotics, "Robert Munafo" <munafo@gcctechNO.SPAMcom> writes:

Did you check the web site first?: http://www.crynwr.com/lego-robotics

Why does everyone keep sticking this tag line on their messages? It's a
great web site, but there is hardly ever a LUGNET message with this tagline
where the topic of discussion is expanded upon by the website.

Asking if you've checked the website "first" makes it sound like you're
going to find relevant information there before posting or replying to the
message that contains the tagline. I've checked it a bunch of times just to
make sure, but in almost all cases the thing being discussed is some new
idea or problem that isn't addressed on the web site.

I don't think people are adding it voluntarily.  It seems to have appeared
out of the blue on December 28, 1998, and is being appended to every message
originating from the lego-robotics@crynwr.com mailing list (which is
gatewayed with the lugnet.robotics newsgroup).  RussellN must've added it to
help people figure out how to unsubscribe.  (I remember a few flame-threads
many moons ago when people were posting 'unsubscribe' messages to the list.)

I never bothered to filter it out before, because people hadn't complained
about it...  But yeah, it's definitely excessive.  Moreover, for whatever
reason, it's not a well-formed sig attachment (it's missing the invisible-
space character after the "--" characters), so this means that it piles up
obnoxiously when people reply to messages.  (Newsreaders are supposed to
automatically delete sigs when composing a reply, but if something isn't a
well-formed sig, then it can't be deleted.)  So there are over 700 messages
that contain more than 1 copy of the tagline, and some even have more.  For
example, here's a message with 5(!) copies of it:

   http://www.lugnet.com/robotics/?n=6297

and one with 7(!!):

   http://www.lugnet.com/robotics/?n=6299

:-p

Now these taglines aren't exactly "traditional spam" because they do point
to a LEGO related website, but they're really only helpful to people on the
listserv side so they can figure out how to unsubscribe (or whatever).  On
the news side, of course, it's just annoying noise.  The good news is that
they can be filtered out using the same mechanism as the "real" spamfilters:

   http://www.lugnet.com/admin/general/?n=1809

I'll go add it to the anti-spam list now.  Sorry for not doing it earlier...

--Todd



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: automatically appended taglines
 
(...) Yeah, I understand that now. I thought everyone was actually putting it in their own SIG files because the website was so good. (It *is* a good web site, but after a while I was starting to wonder if it was some kind of mass hypnosis (...) (25 years ago, 8-Sep-99, to lugnet.admin.general)

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