Broithe

I presume a lot of them are what I call 'pretend marketing' and want to show widespread penetration of the links. It's just a bit weak... Some of it is clearly malicious, with intentions to harvest data once a link has been clicked. My other forum is named after the town where it started as a local forum - most of what goes on is local, some is national, some is even international and there is an astronomy thread for the aliens to join in, although I have not seen an IP off the planet yet. Anyway, this does mean that we do get genuine mistakes, with the British habit of renaming places all round the world and lazily not picking a new name, so we get people innocently wanting you to use their motor repair services in Australia or hairdressers in Virginia, for example. And it is also the name of a breed of dog, so we get a few of them from all over the place (the owners, not the dogs, as far as I know), they could stay, as we also have 'real' owners, but they rarely do, if they're from 'outside'. We do, as with this forum, have genuine members outside the obvious area and I can see the IP addresses used, so somebody new, posting from Vietnam or the Philippines, etc, would be looked at suspiciously, but they could just be on holiday. I like there to be a clear contravention before I kill them. Spammers is just one problem - we have had some seriously weird real people - feuds have developed to the point of police intervention several times. Threats have included physical violence, bombings and arson. We have had people whose 'sport' is to pick fights. Some spammers will put their links in their profiles and signatures, too. There is another 'clever' thing that I've seen a few times when an edit has occurred. I call them "white links". The poster will edit in the link at the end of the post, but change the text colour to white, so that it doesn't show in the post, but it will be found by the cursor, should that hover over it. Whether that is to maybe get an innocent person to click the hidden link out of vague interest, or to 'show' that it has been posted somewhere and survived, I don't know. It all seems a bit quieter here, but that may be down to @BosKonay doing a sweep most mornings..?

I deal with some of this sort of thing on another forum. There is an interesting trick a few spammers have. They will make an innocuous post, then return a few days later and edit in a spam link. I have a daily ritual of going past the current suspects, to see if they have returned since their 'innocent' post. Usually, a return will be for an edit - then I kill them. It's nice to let them waste their time. As you say, the names often have a 'style' to them. this helps, but it is not proof, until they reveal themselves. A lot of them are probably the same person. Other suspicious moves are filling in the birthday as Jan 1st or today's date (although some people will do this genuinely for 'privacy' reasons - and choosing a slightly posh English name. If they do post, English is not always their first language, so a tactic used is to copy an old post from earlier in a thread and repost those words, so it 'looks real'. They will often post in a thread from the distant past, so that the edited in link will be relevant to the subject. Another thing they do is to sign up twice, or more, and then 'respond' to themselves. Probably 90% of the time, they sign up, don't post anything and never return. There are also genuine people who sign up and read the forum, but never feel it necessary to make an input. IP addresses can be a clue, but again, not conclusive. My other forum currently has 192 'people' online - 10 are real individual members, the other 182 are bots, some of them identify themselves honestly, Bing, etc., they're just harvesting stuff for search purposes.

Be careful with the chinchilla dust. I've had a few drying off in the hot press for months now, but I still just get a horrible sludge when I run them through the liquidiser.

This morning's thunderstorm reduced the options for the Sunday morning excursion, but we made it to the summit of Arderin - 527m/1,729ft. This is only a short walk from the 'new road', despite being the highest point of the Slieve Blooms. Anyway, the point is that I found a solitary sleeper, half-buried and there for no clear reason, a hundred metres from the summit cairn. Possibly the sole remains of an abortive plan to rival the railway up Snowdon?

I worked with a Japanese bloke who was very competent about most things. His Polish neighbour had a goldfish that was a bit poorly and she just assumed he would know all about koi carp, etc. He knew nothing, but he wasn't going to admit that. He went round and looked at the fish. It was clearly not well and had a few scales missing. He told her that she must make sure that the whole tank and the various filters and ornaments in it, etc., were all scrupulously clean, assuring her that it would probably all heal up, if she did that properly. She did all that, but the fish got slowly worse. He laboured the point about scrubbing everything to ensure total cleanliness. It still got worse. After about six cycles of this, he grudgingly volunteered to watch her, to see if he could see what she was missing. She seemed to be doing it all perfectly, putting the fish in a Pyrex jug whilst she removed cleaned and rinsed all the internals and the tank itself, scrubbing everything with a nail brush and a toothbrush. As everything seemed as good as it could be, he was about to admit that it was beyond his capacity to suggest anything else, when she hoicked the fish out of the jug, gave it a squeeze of Fairy Liquid and was about to scrub it under the hot tap. At that point, having managed to stop her in time, he assured her that merely replacing the fish and giving him time to recuperate would probably give a better result...

And yet the two largest municipalities are ports...

Of course, in Laois, a lot of the cars had Craggy Island plates.

In 1958 you would have needed a TV set in a DeLorean to watch RTÉ. It would have been noticed if you'd parked one in Donegal town then.

The aerials are interesting. When you could legitimately run a TV without having a licence..?

Liberator + added confusion.

Do as I do and imagine Accurascale to be a money-laundering operation that subsidises our ever-expanding addictions...

I presume this is from Naas, today or yesterday.

Near me in England was a rendering plant. Years ago, liquid 'stuff' - blood, guts and the sort of bits that didn't even go in sausages - were transported carefully in trucks with open tanks on the back. There was considerable dribbling of matter onto the roads, but people got used to that. Matters came to a head, ultimately, when a truck was approaching a pedestrian crossing and a woman with a pram made as if to cross at the last moment. The driver had no option but to stop sharply and the resultant tidal wave of guts, about a third to half the contents of the load, surged over the cab and onto the road. sweeping the woman and the pram for some distance. As it was midsummer, the shops along the street mostly had their doors open and the wave surged in. Nobody who saw this would ever forget it. Subsequently, the use of open tanks ceased.

This has popped up - 7.5 inch, I think - not small... http://tmrr.org/

I have been made aware that the Vale of Rheidol shop has at least two of these available, for a mere twenty quid each. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1919014181547821?multi_permalinks=6251163201666209&hoisted_section_header_type=recently_seen

In a similar vein... https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0ixbKZ8fKVFTiP22wQFAYuVUB37w7QqGzcq8vfC3Fh9a6Rm6npFZ3o5waiNazES2ql&id=100089963332808 "How do you climb a mountain of stacked railway ties? This 1937 photograph by Fox for the Daily Herald was taken in the Great Western Railway sleeper creosoting works in Hayes, Middlesex, England."

And you just know that, on your first day there, you would knock a pot of paint off a plank, all over some posh woman in a fur coat sixty feet below...

When I had a 'proper job', I worked with lots of humans that I wouldn't have trusted that far...

https://www.facebook.com/HistoryColored/posts/pfbid0vLmRjnkjoLrgGqck58uwh38mxG4k4taCwXSQV5DsD3NnMc4JLbAm4LtEMY5o4JyBl "Double leg amputee railway signalman, James Wide, photographed working alongside his pet and assistant, Jack Baboon, in Cape Town during the 1880s. James Wide purchased a chacma baboon in 1881 and trained him to push his wheelchair and operate the railway signals under supervision. Credit: color_byangelina on Instagram"

There is this special edition planned.

https://www.facebook.com/Oldphotos10/posts/pfbid0aSR44MZq6SBj4EjQVfzf3e54KasFcuebCMXojjZdMMT7Tbf9KxG5kx85hRQMw3tkl "August 1935. Workmen painting girders beneath the roof of Liverpool Street Station, London. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)"

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/lancaster-bomber-flies-in-for-armed-forces-day-display-in-larne-this-weekend/a762359719.html

I knew someone would do that, but I didn't expect it so soon, when we've only just begun.

A good bit smaller - between that and a 727, really. The story of the one that had an emergency landing at Izhma, ending up in the forest, being dragged back out, repaired enough to be flown out, then repaired properly and flown on for another decade, before being retired and put on display outside the airline's head office is a very 'Russian' thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alrosa_Flight_514