Friday, March 20, 2009

What a nice e-mail to receive first thing in the morning...

Sense the sarcasm.

I had my coffee in hand as I went through my daily ritual of checking my e-mail. Eleven this morning, about average. Half of them are usually spam, and today was no exception.

Except for this one particular e-mail from my student...

Let me back up quickly and give a little description before I reveal the e-mail. I am the faculty adviser for our student newspaper. I read each article over before it goes in the paper, and I am the moderator for the online edition. I am an overseer, really, not the one who puts the articles online or writes the articles. I just make sure the students are doing their job.

And one of them DEFINITELY was today...

"I just noticed something disturbing, and I don't know if I'm way behind on this, but I've noticed p*rn links are embedded in the titles of the random comments of old articles and some of the newer ones. You can just click on the title of the comment and it will send you to p*rn. My article has three of the fake comments."

ARE YOU KIDDING ME???!!!

Naturally, I went to the admin area to check this out. Thankfully (!!!) I did not have to click on any of the sites to realize that they were indeed p*rn sites. I mean, the name of the Web site spoke for itself.

Did I say Web site, singular? I'm sorry. I meant Web siteSSSSSS. As in forty-plus.

I wanted to bang my head against a wall.

I did delete all of the comments that led to the sites, and I did send an e-mail to the Webmaster (the company is in New York) stating:

"Hey, guys, I am the faculty adviser for our student newspaper, and we just noticed that we got a TON of spam comments on our stories leading to p*rn sites. Is there a way to moderate this so we can get comments from real readers and not have links to p*rn sites on our Web page? Thanks!"

Because that is so not cool.

Good morning, world!!!

Sense the sarcasm.

8 comments:

septembermom said...

Whoa, that was a good catch! Those kind of links sneak in everywhere. That was an enlightening e-mail :)

Mari said...

No - not a nice thing to find this morning. Why do people have to do this?

Sara@iSass said...

I didn't even know you could do such a thing. Then again I'm still in the 1990's when it comes to knowledge about computers...Why are people so wicked? I mean come ON. Good catch, hope your techie guys come back with something. I mean that IS what you pay them for right? To solve web problems?
Lois, you tell the darndest stories! :)

Kelly said...

I"m so sorry to hear that. But yay for the student who alerted you. Great job!

Anonymous said...

Good grief. It never ends!

LuAnn said...

I still sit here with my mouth open. Don't know what to say!!!
Sorry this happened, glad you caught it.

Jackie said...

Oh, wow - how awful. Did you hear back to see if these can be moderated from now on?

MInTheGap said...

It's crazy what can happen out here, especially when you don't have control over your own content. Hopefully the situation was rectified.