Roman Numerals and Link Farmers

In our never ending battle against link farmers and spam purveyors, we have added aa new weapon: The Roman Numeral Code. Implemented by our talented intern, Eric Meyer, this feature forces you to convert a randomly generated number from Roman Numerals to decimal. You can see this at the bottom of your screen right now.

We realize that this is a minor inconvenience, but it has become necessary in our war against the link farmers.

A year or so ago we were inundated by link farms. They spread like wildfire through our blog pages. Cleaning them out manually became a terrible problem. So we launched our first volley against them. We cut them off from their lunch! Links that are posted on this site ARE NOT LINKS.. They get converted to raw text, and are not put into <a> tags. SEARCH ENGINES WON'T FIND THEM!. (The emphasis is for the link farmers who are reading this. I want them to understand that there's no point in farming links on this site.)

This strategy worked fairly well. Most link farmers realized that it was pointless to continue to farm links, and our incidence of poker and porn farming decreased precipitously. But then a new breed of, much dumber, link farmers arose. These nitwits just didn't care that their efforts were fruitless. They build automatic engines that farmed their idiotic links, couching them in pleasant phrases that looked marginally responsive to the topic. Like: "Great post, I really learned a lot. I also learned from: poker, porn, loans, etc." We cleaned these up manually for awhile, but the burden grew too great. So we shut down the ability to comment on older articles. That helped, but still the farmers sowed their weeds.

So now you have to convert a roman number to decimal in order to post your articles. I hope it's not too much of a burden. I expect the comments to this article to be interesting because they will, by definition, all come from people who do not find the task too much of a burden.

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!commentForm -r