MINEstrels

Currently, Moesring is being spammed from two sources

Maybe it is something to do with the start of Autumn, but Moesring has been on the receiving end of more spam than usual recently.

Unfortunately, Moesring isn't talking about the things that (infrequently) arrive in Moesring's inbox. Those of you that can also remember a post written as far back as 2009-01-23 (23 January 2009) may remember that Moesring boldly announced that he is practically spam-free. Less than two-dozen spam emails have ever ended up in Moesring's inbox - and over half were because someone that Moesring once trusted gave his address to spammers.
This last claim might seem a bit far-fetched, but this person got Moesring's address wrong three times and eventually had to be resent it. When the spam started being sent to Moesring and also to the same three misspelled addresses, the origin was pretty obvious.

Anyways, first of all is the fairly typical vote pleas. For those living under a rock that never visit the front page, there is a competition on at the moment. As with all competitions decided by community vote, there are some people that are more... proactive at garnering votes. Or, to put it more simply, they spam everyone they find with pathetic vote requests which are, to use a Mikism, "comments that are so personal and heartfelt that they can be copied and pasted between ... posts".
( Your royalties of half of a dark bounty is on its way to Furtopia via Catfianian courier/assassin. )
(2: Why was Furtopia not in my dictionary, but Catfiania was? )

Latest to take up this endeavour (that Moesring is aware of) is prkumarsharma. He first came to Moesring's attention not long ago because of a vote request on an unrelated blog. Moesring rolled his eyes and proceeded to start making a post to the effect of "Vote requests are back. Why are we not surprised? " when, ironically, said spammer turned up here with his comments.

As you might have gathered, Moesring was not impressed with this. After all, when Google finds 161 similar messages, there is clearly only one thought in their mind. Well, two thoughts if you include "I want to make people hate me for being a spammer".
Anyone affected by receiving a notification for the spammed post will hopefully have seen the note Moesring tried to put into the news item that it was merely spam - and there was no point looking for the new comment because it had already been deleted.
Did the note actually work as intended?

Thankfully, this time there is a happy ending. Unlike the last time Moesring was grumbling about people spamming with vote requests, this spammer's efforts did not pay off. After having a quick view through the list of finalists released today, Moesring believes that they were not included. Maybe justice was done and their spamming counted against them - or maybe they didn't get enough votes because the others spammed more?

The other spam is the "official" spam. Unlike some spam that pretends to be official, this spam actually is official. As you also probably have noticed, Opera 10 was finally released yesterday. Cue a notification about it in Moesring's inbox. A deplorable bait-and-switch - making Moesring think someone wanted to tell him something important, only to find out that it is an automated notification that Opera 10 was released.

Incidentally, Moesring found it interesting to note that Opera 10 doesn't seem to include Opera Unite (for Debian GNU/Linux, at least). Same applies to Opera 10 Beta 3 and Opera 10 RC. It appears to Moesring as though that potentially life-changing innovation (as portrayed by Opera) is completely dead in the water.
You may detect a bit of sarcasm there - the concept of Opera Unite never appealed to Moesring in the same way that BitTorrent never appealed. To Moesring, it sounded too much like a potential method for someone to access arbitrary files on his computer - and some of the uses promoted sounded very close to being illegal (allowing others to receive music from you via the the Media Player service, for example).

The notification about Opera 10 wasn't necessarily a bad thing. The main problem is that Moesring keeps getting them. Moesring believes he has received this notification at least three times now.

[Edit - Actually, it doesn't seem to be repeatedly sent, as Moesring had initially thought. The problem is that it is dependent on a cookie being set - and when Moesring deletes his cookies, it causes the notification to return. ]

This might be lousy, but it is better than the spam Moesring has seen.

As an aside, you may notice that this is the first tag bearing the new long[500] tag. As you may know, Moesring tags long posts for your benefit (except those also tagged with "test", because tests are artificially long). At a glance, you can tell how many words are in a post based on which length tags (if any) are present. The previous minimum used to be 1000 words. It was a "nice" number, but it was a bit too high. Now Moesring just needs to go through all 275 posts to apply the tag retroactively (even though most of the 275 are private posts).

[Edit 08:59 - Finished applying the new tag, not that most people will see the full effect since they are mostly hidden. The task was also shortened by removing some posts. Some posts were reinstated in the process. You need not read them - particularly if you commented on it prior to it being hidden. ]