kay, I ran a little experiment a week ago.

You see, when I got Joomla (which this site runs on) I noticed they didn’t have a feedback mechanism. How cool it would be, I though, to have discussions about the various books I’d read, to have people chime in if they liked my recommendations or not. So I added an app to my site that would allow me to get feedback per each article, and allow discussions to ferment around them.

And I did get some discussions – that was great. I also got some authors commenting on my site (mostly thanking me about my feedback, well, except for that one guy). But then, as is common with humanity, the bots and Ukrainian hackers found me. Turns out that app was not as good as I thought it was.

I was okay with cleaning out occasional span shit that would show up, one or two, here and there. But then I got contacted by my host service. My site was now being used to launch denial of service attacks. This meant I had to pull it down and get help in updating it. So that was a lot of money to clean up, and it pretty much pissed me off.

Back online, now the spam postings were coming in pretty consistent, ten a day. I’d dutifully clean them out. But the charm was gone with this idea. Eventually I just shut that service down. Since I post on Facebook, I can get comments there. Yes, it sucks that I can’t have authors chat with me about their works, but it also sucks to be a tool to be used to bring down corporate sites.

Recently I ran an experiment. I used to get lively discussions around my model train postings. Why not just turn it on for that? So I did. I let it run for a week, got one true comment and thirteen shit postings (all in one day). So that’s that, I figure. I shut the feedback option down for good. It’s like those bill-posters who’d stick paper advertisements on Nelson’s column – it’s hard to have great art when there are capitalists about.

If you have anything to say about this, or anything else I post, you can always reach me via my FACEBOOK book page.

Sorry, but if you want Ukrainian pornography, you’ll have to go elsewhere.

>>>MY OWN HOT LINKS TO HOT DEALS ARE ALWAYS POSTED, OF COURSE. YOU CAN GET MY BOOKS HERE!<<<