IOW, if it didn’t get posted/sent to a bunch of different places, it’s not spam.
Fercryinoutloud, Unc, as a longtime moderator on an Internet message board, you at least ought to have the basic vocabulary down, after all these years.
And especially if you rebuke someone, in your official capacity, for having done X, you ought to know what X means before doing so. Geez.
I think the problem here is that RTF is confusing connotation and denotation.
Publishing companies are unfortunately unable to walk around forcing people to stick strictly to the literal meanings of every word as listed in their dictionaries, so every once in a great while (like, daily) the common usage of a word or two (like, hundreds) may change, and oftentimes, the dictionaries take quite some time to reflect the change. Most people that I know do not restrict the term “spam” to only mass email any longer. It’s used to refer to any unsolicited electronic commercial message: emails, message board posts, journal comments, etc., posted many times or only once.
Sorry, I’d forgotten Unc was no longer a mod. Maybe it was just that his post sounded so much like modding, it pulled me into a time-warp. (It’s just a jump to the left…)
Anyway, it doesn’t change anything: Unc’s been around long enough to know a single post isn’t spam. And if you’re gonna dump on somebody for doing X, you still should know what X is, so you can tell if they’re doing it or not.
And Kat, that’s just absurd. Lots of people here recommend other sites for one reason or another, some commercial, some not. If every such post is now defined as spam, the board is full of it (spam, that is, not the generic ‘it’), and a great many threads should be shut down as a result. If you want to be that liberal about the definition, every link to a for-profit news site to support a point in GD could be considered spam. We’d have to shut down the forum.
And it’s not like Opal’s board is a commercial site in more than a trivial sense; she’s not trying to make a profit off of it, although she runs ads that apparently more or less pay for the bandwidth the board uses.
And, of course, “spam” didn’t originally mean mass e-mail anyway, even if we only consider Internet related meanings. It started out meaning messages that made sensible communication on a mailing list or Usenet newsgroup impossible. It comes from a Monty Python sketch in which a bunch of Vikings at a restaurant repeatedly chant “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam” so loudly the waitress and the other customers can’t hear one another talk. These messages weren’t necessarily ads, just unwanted and disruptive.
It came to mean mass e-mail because all the stoopid ads piling up in your inbox make it hard to read the e-mail you actually want.
Actually, we’ve often called single posts spam. What else would we call a “live forever with Alex Chui” post, even if it is just one post? We remove the spam (as we call it), even if there’s just one.
We call it the same thing over at PF. We just banned a guy whose first OP was basically an ad for his own site. The note in the Mod forum said, “Spam”.
No, day-old grits, chilled until they congeal and then sliced and fried, served with fried Spam, and maple syrup over the lot.
And this question will betray that I know as little about what goes on in MPSIMS as I do about what constitutes good eating: UncleBeer isn’t a mod anymore? Snce when? I thought I was being rebuked by a mod.
