Guest Postings Invited

Most of the "guests" you see online are actually Google bots, not real people. They scan websites and forums for keywords and content to fill up the search engines.

There are other, more sinister bots, whose purpose is to generate spam, and to search for email addresses. If you've recently found (as I have) that a long-lost cousin met a bad end in Nigeria and left you millions of British pounds, but you have to send money to some Nigerian e-mailer to claim it, or perhaps won a bogus lottery that you never entered, chances are good that a bot has picked up your email from the web. Maybe here, maybe somewhere else. To avoid the bots, post your email as follows:

name at domain dot com, rather than name@domain.com, which is what the bots are searching for. People can suss it out, but it fools the bots into ignoring you.

On a side note, the Nigerians have quite a wicked sense of humour. My late cousin was said to be a member of the Helicopter Society and the British Colostomy Association.

Speaking of Nigerian bankers and government officials gone bad who are willing to share their ill-gotten millions with you, if you'd like a little entertainment at their expense, go to

http://www.419eater.com/

The guy has actually managed to get one of the scammers to send him money!

Sorry to get off topic.

Off topic or not, here's a fun way to deal with telephone solicitors. Talk a while and create the impression you are interested in what they are selling. Then hear the doorbell and excuse yourself, saying "I'll be right back."

Then sit and listen quietly. Some solicitors will hang on longer than others.

Of course, this punishes the ill-paid foot soldiers, and not the generals, so is a misdirected strategy.

Best to just hang up, or in an email, delete.

The 419eater site looks like fun.

When I got solicitation calls from companies offering a "great new credit card" I used to reply, "Wow, what great timing - I've totally maxed out my other 5 cards. How fast can you get me signed up?" That used to end the call pretty quick.

The other possiblity with so many guests appearing on the forum, is that some of the "guests" may be members who have not logged on for that session. This is the case with me a lot of the time particularly if I have cleared out the cache for some reason. Also, members may have set their browser to automatically clear out caches/passwords that are not accessed for a certain period, or don't want their browser to remember their login from session to session particularly if they are using a computer that others have access to. I mostly only log on if I want to start or make a reply to a topic.