Which is just fine, because we enjoy a readership that's brighter, on average, than the googlebot.

(It's late, and I'm having difficulty believing I just used 'googlebot' in a serious sentence.)

The formula was something like
1) Find an article somewhere that has hot topics and keywords in it
2) Wrap a website around it, and include Google ads
3) Watch the money roll in

Earl: It's a decent default to prevent even the temporary bounce being on ML would make to a spammer.

Not that it seems to slow them down. Seventy-three by actual count in the past twenty-four hours.

Since we do de-spam by hand... well. Those with the Keys can make that decision.

She didn't seem to think it was, you know, soul-corrupting evil. I'm not sure what I think.

PageRank is one of google's internal quality metrics, and not one of the more important ones. The fetishistic importance assigned to it by the (speak their black name quietly) SEO industry is because it is the only public metric. It's somewhat useless, since it's so widely gamed.

prchecker.info is a SEO outfit, and are not even vaguely affiliated with google. I wouldn't be cleartext linking to them. If you want to check your pagerank, you can install the google toolbar, which has a handy little pagerank meter for whatever page you're on at the time. I wouldn't, since it, of course, reports all this back to google.

Instead, use the offical Google Webmaster Tools, which lets you do all sorts of other nerdy things too.

Also: 73 comment-spam a day? Ha!

Also also: If you want to discard all of this as sour grapes, please note that bbot.org has a phat pagerank of 1, thanks to some dead links and assorted ugly hacks. Beat that!

(I may just have invented that word.)

(I may just have invented that word.)

(The guy's parents left Mexico after being on the losing side of the annual revolution, so he's speaking Spanish with a Mexican accent. Has the name of Alberto Gonzales.)

Maybe the Wikipedia text has a common source with some of the others, rather than being the primary source on the web. Wikipedia says pre-WW2. I've seen a mention of its primary component being RDX, and there's some description elsewhere of RDX-manufacture being set up during WW2, but that wasn't a new compound. (Called Hexogen by the Germans.)

Gelignite would be OK. I wonder if I dare ask in alt.engr.explosives

I think spammers care about rel="nofollow" the same way they care about the fact that I can't read Russian.

As far as "sharing the juice", the NH's do occasionally promote links from the comments to the sidebar.

Now if spammers are targeting ML to get linkjuice, then the jury is still out. I don't believe rel="nofollow" is doing anything positive for ML, but you'd have to run an experiment to see.

Since rel=nofollow is by default in MT, presumable we're getting no help from other sites that use MT.

This is a fossilized tactic from the anti-comment-spammer war.

What this has done is zero out all links for Google/Yahoo/Bing. For sites that are incapable of catching & scrubbing spam, this is a very good thing for Google. For sites like ML that are able to catch and scrub their spam, this is a very bad thing for Google.

Ob disclosure: I work for Yahoo! Search.

wikispooge.

(I may just have invented that word.)

It appears that you have.

Yahoo gives a single hit for "wikispooge", your post, while Google gives three false hits (two including the string /wiki/spooge, and one for "wikisplooge". (From which we learn only that Yahoo has crawled Making Light more recently than Google, and has somewhat less-aggressive near-match algorithms.)

> one of my characters is doing nasty things to the Insurgents in the Spanish Civil War, and I wanted to know just when Nobel 808 became available.

Um...

(FX: sound of moose looking for copy of Davis)

There's a Swiss patent from 1932 for a plastic explosive made from PETN with between 10 and 30% nitroglycerin or nitroglycol.

Gelignite (60% nitroglycerin, 4% nitrocellulose, 8% wood meal and 28% potassium nitrate) was certainly commercially available at that time, since it appears in The British Encyclopedia of 1933.

> Maybe the Wikipedia text has a common source with some of the others, rather than being the primary source on the web. Wikipedia says pre-WW2.

It was certainly used extensively during WW2, but is likely to have been military use only (and secret).

> I've seen a mention of its primary component being RDX,

That's the modern version: C4. (RDX, mineral oil and an emulsifier to stop it separating out during storage.)

> and there's some description elsewhere of RDX-manufacture being set up during WW2, but that wasn't a new compound. (Called Hexogen by the Germans.)

And discovered in 1899 by Henning, who patented it for use in medicine.

(British: RDX, American: Cyclonite, German: Hexogen, Italian: T4.
Chemists: cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine C3H6O6N6.)

> Gelignite would be OK. I wonder if I dare ask in alt.engr.explosives

It's probably still full of trolls and idiots.

Hmmm... the Moose Operating Division is unable to turn up their copy of Fordham, so further research is not possible at this time.

Hope this is at least /some/ help.

Cadbury.

I checked the link I'd found, and, while it may be wrong, C-4 and Nobel 808 are both described as RDX-based, with different plasticisers, etc. And the Nobel 808 ingredients seem old-fashioned, plant-extract rather than chemical factory. It doesn't feel wrong, but that's no guarantee.

The Wikipedia article on RDX has no specifics about production outside Britain and North America, but hints at various production processes being used in the 1920s.

Ideally, a pre-1936 plant producing RDX would be enough to let me handwave stuff.

It's my inner geek prefering to minimise the amount of handwaving here.

wikispooge or wikisplooge?
What about wikispunk?!

But when I first encountered the term spooge, it had connotations of fakery--excessive volume.

I managed to find a non-Wiki reference to a pilot plant at Woolwich Arsenal in 1933, and a process being developed at Picatinny Arsenal in 1925.

The Chemistry of Explosives, Jacqueline Akhavan, Royal Society of Chemistry, 2004.

This is good enough for what I need.

A fanboy can be described as 'spooging all over' the new ish of some comic he follows, by someone observing said fanboy's squee behavior in person. Generally, someone describing such behavior as 'spooging' thinks it's kind of disgusting in its over-the-topness (imagine if getting a copy of the new ish made one literally spooge instantly, in public -- and you were watching? Like that), whereas calling it squeeing seems, to me, to denote a sort of hyperactive, cheerfully insane enthusiasm.

Kiki in Sluggy Freelance squees constantly, as an example; I don't think I've ever seen her do anything I would call spooging.

If that helps at all ...