The Curse (and Futility) of Spamming DLU
One of the drawbacks of having a public (and popular) website is that we have to have email addresses posted to the site so you, our fans, can contact us. We also need to make ourselves readily accessible in case lawyers from a certain company need to let us know that we're doing very bad things (tm). As a result of our displays of public attention, we're very often the recipients of a huge volume of Spam.
Most of the Spam is pretty typical... offers for mortgages on new wizard towers, little pink pills to make you happy, or make your little Raistlin stop slouching. There's ads for free or cheap software, little devices to sneak peeks into someone's closet, and even ads for girls that will do things that would make Kitiara blush furiously!
Frankly, it's tiresome and annoying. I have to admit, it's quite possible that we've lost submissions or emails from the fans amid the deluge of pure junk email. In fact, we may have misplaced that summons email from the lawyers a few months ago, since "Jenny and her farm animals want to meet YOU!!!11" seemed far more entertaining.
Even though we have received far more than our fair share of Spam to keep us occupied until the Live Ones come home and Mina takes over the world again, we've actually had one email that stands alone, separate from the flood of nonsense. It was an ad for a "professional makeover" from a company that specializes in web design.
If anything, they should specialize in some researchers who really do check out the sites so they can make a customized letter instead of using a form letter that makes it quite obvious they didn't do one whit of research. Then again, if they had, we wouldn't have received such a laughable attempt to seduce us to the dark side of the moon.
(Original mail in regular type, my comments in italics)
Subject: Regarding your website 'www.dragonlanceunderground.com'
To: feedback@dragonlanceunderground.comHello,
Your web site-'www.dragonlanceunderground.com', the official website of " Dragonlance Underground ", has been Great! I observe that Dragonlance Underground is the staging ground of the revolution; the war we wage is a war against hypocrisy, arrogance and hubris.
(Boggles. I didn't know essays such as "Raistlin is a woman", "Tanis is gay", and Dragonlance characters as 'My Little Ponies' were revolutionary and war waging. At least with those 20 steel piece words, you'd think whoever wrote this letter would have the brains to at least figure this out.)
The contents of your site like FEATURES, LIBRARY, DALAMAR, GALLERY, NUGGETS, INTERACTIVE, etc are quite interesting and informative.
(I have to admit... I love this part. It looks like they used an Internet spider to pull out a list of our sections and then just pasted them in. How Dal the Dork and the kender singalong can be considered informative really baffles us over here.)
I enjoyed browsing your site. The pictures featured on the site were really eye-catching.
(Oh horse twaddle. I bet you're just bored of your farm animals Jenny, and you're oogling over the pics of Raistlin and Kitiara in their panties.)
I visited quite a lot of sites, and would like to kindly recommend a professional makeover for your entire web site (http://www.dragonweyr.com ).
(Not only does this offer more proof of your idiocy, as you cannot even get your copy/paste program to work properly and put *our* site name into your form letter. Also, the fact that the mistake is so obviously close in alphabetical order to our site name really drives home the point that you simply used a spider crawler to collect information into a list and then made your letter based on that list. Where were you when they handed out the brains?)
I work at [company name removed], and would like to offer you to redesign your complete web site absolutely free of charge. You will only be asked to pay for the monthly hosting, which is only $9.95/mo. There are no other fees, and there is absolutely no risk from your end.
(Frankly, I like our present set up. Free design already, and in fact, cheaper hosting than you're offering. As tempting as you think your offer is, I don't think you can beat our present arrangements.)
If you are not satisfied with our work, you will not be asked to pay anything. Please let me know if you would be interested in this offer (in fact, I can't imagine why you wouldn't be).
(You have a very poor imagination then my dear.)
Take a look at [link removed] for details. When signing-up, please indicate [name removed] (that's my name :-) ) in the "How did you hear about this offer?" field.
(Thanks for clarifying your name. Not only are you dim enough to send out a completely unrelated form letter, you have to assume that we're dim enough on our end to not figure out your name, even though you signed the email. Thank you for insulting us. Not only did your offer have two strikes against it (for Spamming my inbox and for creating an obviously generic letter that indicates you didn't even look at our site), but you now insult my intelligence. Here's your gully dwarf consolation prize for being such a bint.)
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing from you!
(I can promise you, we certainly weren't happy to hear from you.)
With Best regards,
[name and personal information removed](Because frankly, I'm not going to give you any potential free advertising. I hope a clan of kender descends onto your offices and steal all your network cables. That ought to teach you a lesson on filling people's inboxes with insulting dribble.)
Let this be a lesson to you kiddies... if you're going to Spam, do it right. But be smart and don't Spam in the first place. People will hate you and wish you dead.
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