azurelunatic | Good book-selling practice

Current Mood: annoyed

Good book-selling practice

There is a time and place for plugging one's book, and ... there is not. Imagine, if you will, an LJ account created solely so that the author of a book on programming could post comments to the journals of people mentioning the subject that he wrote his book on, with the advice to go buy his book.

Creative, but so very NOT acceptable to most LJ folks.

garnetdagger got a little huffy, and ranted briefly about why you should not buy Learning Perl, by Randal L. Schwartz.

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I'm not so sure thats really him.

Ah.

Troll bad.

I did not expect her to use such restrained and moderate language. Seriously, is she getting softer?

More controlled, and less likely to flame off when not immediately provoked.

Now that (ploy to sell books) is totally warped! And I agree, that was a restrained rant.

Yar.

I also think it's a fake. I'm currently trying to prove or disprove that it is, but so far the evidence that I've gathered:
Email address is merlyn@stonehenge.com and offbeat sense of humor, possible inflated ego: O'Reilly bio
This is the same email address that is given by the webpage linked to by the troll user, which shows an ego about the same size of that of the troll user, though less blatantly hostile towards neophytes.

Running through perl communities from PerlMongers (which the O'Reilly bio says he started produces this bio, which is appropriate for someone with the abrasive personality of a geek who doesn't bother acting human and has a fairly large ego. This links to the same site as the LJ Merlyn. It also points to an active Internet life.

However, does the perlmonks Merlyn (who would probably get burnt out if he were a troll) actually flame, or troll with mention of book? I sampled a small number of random entries, and none were written quite as jarringly as the noted post. This plus the fact that the account has apparently remained unused except for trolling do point to a troll account.

Considering informing "the real guy" of his LJ identity and seeing how he reacts, or informing o'reilly of the troll, possibly causing them to either yell at the real guy or threatening the troll with real action. However, I can't decide which of these would lead to greater amusement.

Spam comments with mention of book. I am suspecting google, then spam.

Either way, it's annoying.

Probably informing the real guy that he's trolling, and then telling O'Reilly.

At least the comment you linked to is not indexed by google though one other is.

This is a very recent comment linked to.

The affected user can also point Abuse to the comment, note to them that

livemerlyn had no prior contact to them, point out the "I am selling shit" nature of the comment, point at the only other Googleable comment that the user has left, and Abuse may conclude that the account is only used for promoting shit that the users do not wish to have promoted to them.

It would be ... amusing ... to see a guru get TOSed from LJ. Weird, but amusing.

See, getting him TOSed would only deal with *part* of the issue. The other part should probably be dealt with by the real guy or O'Reilly or both, depending on whether it's really him or not.

I think I'll send him a letter telling him that he seems to have a livejournal, and that it is being used for nefarious and illicit purposes that have got LJers up in arms and threatening boycott.

Good point.

*pets the nice Sith*

Well, that and just TOSing him would be boring

No, I had no idea that trying to help someone by suggesting my books would be taken so quizzically. Oddly enough, I've been doing this for about six months, and this is the first complaint I've gotten. In fact, most people were sorta happy to see me show up.

Oh well. Some people just don't get it.

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Yes, it really was me, not a troll.