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Welcome to azurelunatic’s Dodgy Analogy Theatre, in which she attempts to explain the Outsider’s View of the Current Mail Not Delivered/Spam Problem at LiveJournal! (The information here is gathered from news posts and discussions in news comments and such, and the analogy gets dodgier the further it's strung along.)
First, understand that I picture spammers not as businesspeople who need re-training on how to use the computer, nor as members of a shady underworld, nor even as the stereotypical cave-dwelling geek gone bad. Even though all three of the former are involved in spamming, that’s not my mental image. I picture them as birds -- in looks, a cross between the worst aesthetic properties and personal habits of the vulture and the chicken: the teenage chicken whose voice is breaking and still retains the shrillness of its chickhood peep, but the full volume and power of its adult voice, and nigh unto zero control of its voicebox. It makes inexperienced theremin players sound tuneful. They favor nesting in the concrete notches of Brutalist architecture, but are opportunists who make their homes anywhere.
Now picture LiveJournal as a home-based business: mostly family, a lot of kids, a few external staff members who come and go. They have a very large back yard with blueberry bushes in it, and they make blueberry jam and ship it off to people who order it off the internet. (These are the comment notifications.)
To make this analogy work, they somewhat unwisely leave the addressed boxes sitting out on the back porch. Most of the time, the box gets its jar of jam, and is closed up and shipped off.
Other times, a spammer (remember, we’re talking birds here) lays its egg in the box, and closes it up safely. And the teenagers doing the shipping runs figure that any closed box is jam ready to go, slap some tape on it, and ship it off, so some very surprised and annoyed customers sometimes get a spammer’s egg delivered when they were expecting a pot of very nice blueberry jam.
( It only gets dodgier and weirder from here. )
First, understand that I picture spammers not as businesspeople who need re-training on how to use the computer, nor as members of a shady underworld, nor even as the stereotypical cave-dwelling geek gone bad. Even though all three of the former are involved in spamming, that’s not my mental image. I picture them as birds -- in looks, a cross between the worst aesthetic properties and personal habits of the vulture and the chicken: the teenage chicken whose voice is breaking and still retains the shrillness of its chickhood peep, but the full volume and power of its adult voice, and nigh unto zero control of its voicebox. It makes inexperienced theremin players sound tuneful. They favor nesting in the concrete notches of Brutalist architecture, but are opportunists who make their homes anywhere.
Now picture LiveJournal as a home-based business: mostly family, a lot of kids, a few external staff members who come and go. They have a very large back yard with blueberry bushes in it, and they make blueberry jam and ship it off to people who order it off the internet. (These are the comment notifications.)
To make this analogy work, they somewhat unwisely leave the addressed boxes sitting out on the back porch. Most of the time, the box gets its jar of jam, and is closed up and shipped off.
Other times, a spammer (remember, we’re talking birds here) lays its egg in the box, and closes it up safely. And the teenagers doing the shipping runs figure that any closed box is jam ready to go, slap some tape on it, and ship it off, so some very surprised and annoyed customers sometimes get a spammer’s egg delivered when they were expecting a pot of very nice blueberry jam.
( It only gets dodgier and weirder from here. )
