I attend a church in Worthing that is currently looking to move in to a warehouse in an industrial estate in Worthing.  We were asked to write letters of support to the council and our local councillors to encourage them that this would be a good thing for the community.  Below is my letter that I wrote in support of the planning application.


I am writing to support the proposal of Jubilee Church’s change of use request. It is my understanding that there has been some opposition to the change of use and I would like to state my own reasons for why it would be good for the community on a local level and for Worthing on a wider level.  I have attended Jubilee Church for ten years and thus have some insight on Jubilee Church’s intentions for the use of this particular site.

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I’ve seen it a little bit on my spam filter on this site.  My thoughts are that they’re expecting blog authors to mark their comment as “Not Spam”.  This would then skew the spam filters a little more in their favour!

Thus when they submit more posts to buy absolutely real genuine rolexs for rock bottom prices, they’re more likely to get their post past the filters. Still unlikely, but never-the-less more likely.

Don’t regard comments as “Not Spam” until you see their comment history, and determine for yourself whether this is Spam or Ham.

 

Gamestation have finally replied to my requests and have provided this list of all the fake gamestation sites they had.

Some are quite funny and I would have loved to have found them when they were up!

  • Trampstation
  • Flamestation
  • Moustachestation
  • Grannystation
  • Pigstation
  • Tutustation
  • Bikinistation
  • Artificialinseminationstation
  • Tentingstation
  • Chavstation
  • Legstation
  • Bongstation
  • Moiststation
  • Stripstation
  • Massdebatestation
 

To help launch their new-look website, Gamestation recently held a competition for their customers to find other websites that “stole” their new design.  The competition encouraged customers to investigate websites that ended in “station.co.uk”.  I found a few but it never got recognised on the website and I never heard back from anyone. I asked gamestation’s customer support for some details of the competition and they were as helpful as a brick wall.

The competition page

Confirmed websites such as grannystation.co.uk and chavstation.co.uk were found and posted on the gamestation’s competition page.

Screenshot as of 7th November 2011 of the competition page on the gamestation website

As soon as I figured out that all the fake websites adhered to a simple naming pattern, (plus with me being a bit geeky and excited about writing something new) I wrote a powershell script that attempted to visit every site.  The script took in the English dictionary of words between 2 and 8 characters long and appended “station.co.uk”.  If it found a link to the gamestation.co.uk website, it would log it and move on to the next.

The script, it ran…

Lo-and-behold it found two more that had not been posted on the gamestation site.  I didn’t really care if I won the grand prize, I just did it for the fun and wanted to investigate all the work that the designers went to to create these sister sites.

I found www.tutustation.co.uk and www.bongstation.co.uk

I contacted customer services…

I entered the competition and checked back daily to see if my new findings were detailed on the site. Nope. Long after the competition ended, I emailed customer services and these are the responses I received:

Sorry but this competition does not run anymore . I no longer have access to any information regarding this.

Regards,

Syd W

I responded by saying “I know it doesn’t run anymore, that’s why I’m asking. How come you have no information regarding the competition? I would just like a list of the websites that were involved. Some information is available at [link to competition page] but it’s old and that information was available before the end of the competition.”

I would [...] like to apologise for any confusion. A list of the ‘fake’ websites and winners can be found by following the link below:

http://www.gamestation.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/HubArticleView?hubId=148280&articleId=148287&catalogId=10202&langId=45&storeId=10651

I apologise for any confusion this may have caused, and please do not hesitate to contact us with any further queries you may have.

Regards,

Sam F

Haha, this is the same link that I had just emailed to them! I ask again: “I’m afraid that is not the case. I found http://tutustation.co.uk/ but that is not listed. Why can’t you provide the full information?”

The competition regrettably is now over. If you have submitted your answer to the competition providers they will contact us direct if you are winner.

If you have any further queries please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Regards,

Charlotte H

Their excuse of the competition being over implies that I should have asked while the competition was running! What a joke.  At least now though I have learned from this email that the competition providers are a separate company to gamestation, yet at the bottom of the competition page it clearly states: “The promoter of the competition is Gameplay (GB) Ltd. trading as Gamestation”.

For now I don’t think I will ever find out what the other fake gamestation sites were. Maybe I did find them all? My curiosity is not yet satisfied.

 

Every day I get two or three new followers on my Twitter. More often than not, these new followers are what I would classify as spam accounts. When I began to tweet, I would courageously report these followers to Twitter as spam accounts and soon enough they were removed and deleted from the internets.

Now though I rarely report users that follow me. Even if they are truly spammy and not just some start-up company wanting friends. And do you know why? One reason and one reason alone; my follower count increases by one.

On Twitter it seems that if you have plenty of followers, you are recognised as more interesting and real people are more likely to follow you. So in reality for each follow spam I receive, I secretly want them to not be reported as spam accounts and to bump up my follower count for as long as possible.

Twitter couldn’t really change my behaviour unless it actually proved useful to me to actually report these accounts.  At the moment, reporting a spammer reduces my follower count so it’s actually detrimental to do so. Even if they didn’t increase my follower count in the first place until that spam user had passed some process to officiate themselves, it would still be useless to report because “oh, someone else will do that”.

On the other hand, Eli Dourado has had a great idea to incentivise the process of reporting spammers. He puts forward the notion of increasing the likelihood of you showing up in the recommended users list when you correctly identify spam accounts on a regular basis. This I think would greatly increase the reporting of spam accounts, at least for me anyway, and thus have a great impact on the spam that fills Twitter on a day-to-day basis.

In my opinion, it is a great idea but yet it still requires some user interaction (the process of reporting spam accounts). If we look at another medium which battles with spam on an even greater level, email, we find that emails are filtered by our own chosen provider. Gmail have their own algorithms for filtering spam, as do Windows Live Mail and Yahoo!, as do many thousands of other providers. Spam protection for email inboxes is not a new ingenious idea; it’s an absolute requirement.

Could this then be a way of dealing with Twitter spam? Could Twitter become its own protocol with different providers providing different degrees of spam protection, privacy, security, analytics, or premium services? Could Twitter providers of the future trim our timeline for us by allowing us to view only interesting tweets based on the context? Gmail has introduced a Priority Inbox for your email which, based on the context of the email, categorises the email to varying degrees of importance. If the email is directed solely at you, it has a greater importance than a newsletter that is sent to thousands of other people.  Could a new Twitter provider highlight the most important or interesting tweets to you?

Allowing third-party clients to communicate with Twitter has been one of Twitter’s compelling features, by allowing users to choose any client that they wish. Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed, Hootsuite and many more allow users to plug-in and use Twitter in their own way, however they are severely limited to Twitter’s own API which offers no extra benefits such as context analysis or analytics. Implementing a Twitter feed provider would be a huge cost to Twitter and would effectively outsource their own ad revenue to other companies.

For many years Twitter’s fail whale has shown to millions of users when the service is overloaded or breaks for some reason. Or in fact even worse when Twitter is blocked to an entire country when tweeting the truth is deemed a huge security risk. These things would surely be rectified by implementing a Twitter protocol and allowing third-party providers to display, analyse, post to Twitter in their own way. It would also encourage competition in the market place where other micro-blog services would have the opportunity to offer more than the behemoth of Twitter.

This has all been simply written up over my lunch break and I’ve hardly had time to really contemplate what I’m suggesting so the idea may seem terse and undeniably infeasible but from what I can see, I can draw some similarities between Twitter and good ol’ email and can see some future in providing Twitter in a way which is more open and diverse. Perhaps this could call for a new micro-blogging format akin to diaspora* that uses collections of server nodes to share information.

Either way, I think that Twitter will eventually have to combat their spam problems or become so overridden with spam that users will at some point give up and leave the site completely. Nah, actually what am I even talking about? How else is anyone going to know how much the world just ♥’s Justin Bieber?

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