Asylum-ET™

This is going to a bit a bit of an odd post but recently I bought a webkinz for my daughter. When the thing arrived I was a bit disappointed. They darn thing was a dollar store stuffed animal that cost $20.00 Just the same though with it came use of this website for webkinz where the kids are supposed to be able to go and create and play with their webkinz in a virtual world.

That is all great. She likes to play the games and all but most often it is not even possible to log into the website. Today my daughter had tried a few times to log in and play but was unable to since the website uses javascript for literally everything and something was changed in their code so now when you log in and get to the screen you are after it is a JavaScript popup that is not resizable and is to small to see what is on the screen.

After she tried again with the same thing resulting I asked if I could have a look. I tried clicking the login button on the main page and sure enough it is broken. So I then decide to put my mouse over the login link to see where it goes. javascript:pW(‘loadReturnUser’); Is what is in place of the link. So I then do a view source on the page to find out what it is that the function pW and the value loadReturnUser does. I find a few included JavaScripts in the head of the page. Oddly name location I may add. They call their JavaScripts directory assets. Interesting just the same but anyway I go and open up 2 JavaScript files. The first was not it then the second had the function in it. This function makes a link for a few browser types including the loadReturnUser into the link.

So I go and copy the url that this function assembles and then enter it into the address bar then change the +page+

We have all encountered them. Most are very poorly done and even though they do stop some Spam from getting through they stop a lot more legitimate users than you would be happy with if you only knew you lost them due to the Captcha.

Interested in finding out just how many that is? That would be as simple as tracking every time your comment form is posted and weigh that against the amount of comments you see actually made it through (Both marked as Spam and good clean comments). It is safe to say that if you have 30 attempts at posting a comment form and yet you only have 3 comments then you had at least 20 visitors try to post a comment, about 4 of which even tried more than once and yet you lost those viewers and their comments why? Because your Captcha sux.

As we get more attuned to the web in its every day use we form habits. My greatest habit that is widespread beyond myself is arriving at a comment form that has a non-legible garble of text and lines in an image for a Captcha. Can you say next site please? You just lost me. What is your purpose in that anyway? Are you trying to make your would be users go away? Something tells me this is surely not the case but you still use these Captcha.

I wonder if by using these with all the garbled text you actually think it is more secure than just text in an image? Are there actually bots on the net capable of reading and deciphering what an image says? Not really. There is however software semi capable of determining words from a scan but do you realize what such a program would cost to have written for the web and also that the only ones who could afford it would be those like Google and MS and you know they are not about to do that since by evading the Captcha like this could be viewed as an actual attack against your website and business and that could even lead to some pretty hefty legal penalties and fees for the person using the tool to in a sense hack the Captcha and your site.

Anyway that is about enough of that. Now on to why I write this post. This is my alternative to using Captcha. It is one that won’t tick your viewers off. You could use it by itself or even with a typical Captcha but loose the funky text crap already.

Add one field to the form. Give it any name such as accounts.

2 rules to follow here that other similar methods fail with are.

1. Do not name this field Captcha or hidden or anything like that. A name such as accounts is perfect.
2. Do not make the input’s type = hidden nor should you make it with a class named hidden or anything of that sort.
With that said you would add this new field and we will call it accounts.
We will give it a value for the class property and name that acnts so what we will have would look like this.
<input type="text" name="accounts" value="" class="acnts"/>

Once you have done that then we will go into the sites style sheet and add.
.acnts {display:none;}

Next you will see that the new field “accounts” is not visible to the viewer when you load this form up in your browser. It is however visible to Spam bots. Spam bots will fill it in. Yes even the smart ones that got around this type of method before. Why? Simple. The ones everyone else has used break my 2 rules and so if you read them and follow them it becomes pretty obvious why they fail.

So now the point to this. When the form is submitted we check to see if $_POST['accounts'] is not empty and if it is not then we do not go further since it is a spammer otherwise we move on.

Pros/Cons
Pro: Users do not get furious with you and leave.
Pro: Nothing extra for the user to do.
Pro: No external calls to some site that you were using for your Captcha
Pro: 100% increase in comments.

Con: Someone with a personal vendetta could make their Spam software so that it skips the field named accounts but this would require then to actually know that your website intends for that to happen which is why we use a name like accounts as apposed to Captcha or hidden.

Just before I last went to bed I had been on the phone with a good friend of mine and a fellow programmer. We had been discussing the days work and the progress we had made for the day. We discussed the web shop we have been building for some time now and he took a tour through the pages, options and features that the shop includes.

So far the shop has been tested to work in Firefox, Opera, Sleipnir and lastly Internet Exploder 6. At that end we decided that if it works in those 4 browsers then we should not have any issue with any other browsers so long as the browser follows standards for CSS and HTML. After testing the four layouts we have chosen to use with the shop against these three common and one un-common browsers all of them appear to be displaying just fine.

So this friend of mine noticed a bit of oddness in the browser he uses. He had stated that the top menu has one link that is not positioning properly and is not totally clickable. Only one of the two words in the link is clickable. This is most odd since the links are not linked to individual words but the both together in the same link.

From previous discussions we have had and a countless number of issues he has reported with a number of websites using this browser I would think by now he would decide to use a browser that works but he choses to be difficult and continue with this browser that has obvious issues that span well beyond our themes. He uses the browser named Konqueror. Konqueror is a browser for use with Linux only so we have no way of testing and adjusting our layout for use by it since we do not have a Linux install.

When my friend made this complaint I sleepily replied well man use a real browser. After just waking up the conversation and my response was still fresh in my mind and I can not help but to be bothered by it. Why this friend would be so set on using a browser that obviously does not work properly is beyond me. He claims that Firefox is to great an issue for him to use on Linux even though it is cross compatible between the Operating systems we use. He states that the memory and resources it uses are not acceptable and he can not use Firefox because his machine becomes sluggish.

We both have the same specs for memory so I do not see the issue but just the same it is a problem. The themes do not work proper in Konqueror and seriously enough the only advise I have is use to get a better browser. That may sound like a cop out but the thing is that Konqueror is seemingly the only one it does not work in. Until Konqueror decides to fix whatever issues they have the inhibit a large number of websites from displaying proper STOP using it. After enough people discontinue the use of it the developers at Konqueror will be forced to fix the issues or sacrifice users.

Another thing I would like to comment on is the ongoing barrage of dissatisfaction from developers that we receive on account of a message that displays in our themes that informs the user that they should enable Javascript if they wish to have access to all of the features that are available with the shop.

First of all this is good practice to alert your users of such things since they will see a degradation in the sites performance if they do not have Javascript enabled and therefore will think the website is broken.

Secondly Javascript has a place in development and about 90% of all websites use it in some form or another. Javascript has no right in handling security or anything to that effect but for the basic things we use it for such as confirmation dialog boxes and things of that nature, that is exactly what its purpose is and it is intended for use like this.

Thirdly the only people who have Javascript disabled are typically developers who are not users and seldom look at things from a users prospective. Not to mention it takes a whole of .3 seconds to click a button and enable it. Laziness?? That is what it appears to me.

So for these confirmation dialogs and such why Javascript and not using code? Well that is simple. Ease of use and saving on bandwidth as well as time. The other option is to code yet another page that when a user clicks say a delete link they are sent to another page that asks them if they wish to continue and then yet another page that says the action was completed.

Ok so that without Javascript is what a three step process that depending on the speed of your server, how many images are in your layout and so on could take upwards of 2-3 minutes since now we are going to have three page loads instead of 2 of which the last the user does not worry about to much. Not acceptable especially if all that had to be done was one short little snip in the link like return confirm(‘Do you really want to do that’) which pops up a message that the user can click yes or no and then the action is performed or not. None of this is much of an issue for developers since we all typically have 16+ MBit connections but think of your users who a large portion are still on dial up. Do you want them to come back? I am assuming you would rather they did not but we enjoy and rely on return visitors so we do what we need to please them not other developers.

As you can see we have made our minds up. The javascript notice when javascript is disabled will remain, we will continue to use the javascript were appropriate and we will not loose any sleep over Konqueror being a junk browser.

Due to recent events ALL clients must pay a 50% deposit of the total balance due to retain any form of services from us regardless of the type of service. Entertainment services will require the entire balance to be paid in full on the date of the event. Asylum Entertainment will NOT start a performance until this payment has been made so to insure your event goes as planned be sure to make prompt payments available.

Programing services will be subject to a similar stipulation were intellectual property will not be released to the client until payment is made in full and work will not commence on a project until a 50% deposit has been made on the total amount due.

We can and will NOT make quotes until a complete outline of service has been submitted and approved by Asylum Entertainment LLC at which time it will be signed and returned to the client.

We no longer accept payment programs or any other form of incomplete payment for services from anyone including but not limited to non profit organizations. If you are not prepared to pay for services do not bother to contact Asylum Entertainment LLC since you are wasting both your and our time.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause but we can not afford to continue giving our time and services away. We already have such a low rate for service that we can not afford to go unpaid.

I don’t have any solid details just yet but there was just a 17 year old boy murdered a few blocks from here in downtown Rutland, VT. Apparently at about 4:30 PM a man in his early 20′s named John Bruno just walked up behind this poor boy and slit his throat. This happened right near our Depot Park near Wall-mart. The boy passed on shortly after enroute to the hospital. We do not have any details as to who this boy was but our sympathies go out to his family

Here in Rutland we have not had to many murders. I can count the total in my lifetime on one hand. This is just disgusting that a human thinks they have the right to take the life of another for any reason. Totally un-acceptable. The real sad part outside of the murder itself is that I am willing to bet he does less time for this than the boy has acquired in age.

Anyway once again our hearts and prayers are with the family in this unfortunate event that has ended such a young souls life before it even had a chance to begin

This post is going to tick a lot of people off but that is seriously the majority of it’s purpose. I am so sick and tired of getting no shit 500+ spam a day. It is seriously pathetic. All day long I get these same losers who post comments linking to garbage sites with less then appropriate content on them or the ones I cant stand the most are the how big is your… and well you know the ones. We never allow your comments through so why do you continue to eat our bandwidth? This is costing us money and once it totals up enough we have each of your ip addresses and various other details to identify you and we will be seeking restitution as soon as the cost mounts up to an amount that is criminally punishable. Think about that one the next time you go to post your rubbish comments.

So anyway without further adieu we are going to present some of the comments here as we have done in the past only we will be altering the links they included to link to things we chose instead so thank you spammers for your content. Maybe this time you get the hint?

We call this one the freelance special. This has appeared in our comments about 600 times so far under different user names but the same series of ip addresses.

Hi! Good site respect! Visit [junk link was here] and [junk link was here] Thanks!

This type of comment is believed to be generated by

freelancer

person who pursues a profession without a long-term commitment to any one employer.

type websites that allow jobs to be posted where a website is searching for x amount of one-way pr x links for x dollars. The takers of these jobs fire up their spammer software with a list of urls and smash the internet with junk to hundreds and even thousands of websites that allow comments to be placed and the sad part of this is that I’ll bet that 85% of them do not moderate the comments.

This is what we like to call the dumb teen

Like! Thank you!
[Like Uhm I pasted links here but I'm not cool enough to figure out why they aren't showing]
I am glad to find this forum! [This isn't a forum you twit]
[Like uh I wish I had a real life then maybe they would show my link]
Like! Thank you!
[Don't they say if you try something the same exact way more than once and it still fails you should probably give up or you would be considered insane?]
Thank you! I delighted!
[Like uh. This sux I think I'll do it some more]
Good stuff, very nicely done!

The tickle my ego approach. This one has appeared about 500 times so far.

I agree with the author.
[My junk links won't show]
Very nicely done
[I keep banging my head on the desk and it hurts]
The Author, you – genius
[I am still doing it]
Excellent work, added to favorites!
[I don't get it. Why do I have a headache?]

And then there is this one most odd of all. I am not sure if this is spam or not. The comment was literally a whole book more or less. The posters name looked suspicious like taxsomethingorother and the posters web address included with the post seemed to be a female named Sonja who has a blog that allegedly allows users to post about deals making it even more suspicious but what made it most odd is that this post the poster actually knew how to make a link. Like OMG! Anyway the content of it I read every bit and it was surely very interesting. The originator claims to be a man who is in love with Mary who is his girlfriend and he wants to marry you Mary! He wants that so bad he has told millions of people by spamming their blogs telling the blog owners to email this message to as many people as they can that he wants to marry you in the worst way.

Surely an interesting approach if this is legit but hey who is to say what is romantic I mean in a geeks world you never know. Heck at this point I am starting to think that I want to marry Mary if she is such a geek that she actually would find such a proposal (JK). Anyway so he included a poem to Marry that goes like this.

Mary, please forgive me, as you know English is not my native language. And I am not a poet. But I mean it from my heart.
My angel,
Five years ago, I will always remember the day When fate made us meet, blissful Alaskan moments in May Earth spun around us and a journey began Love, warmth, happiness, enough the years to span.
The longer it lasts the more grows our bond And with 80 still – of you I will be fond Whatever happens, I will stay at your side Through good and bad, together let us stride
No second with you was ever wasted
You are the sweetest I have ever tasted
We have spent so many years – why not a life?
Mary, will you marry me – and become my wife?
Mary, if you have received that and have recognized me, then give me a sign so that I can continue with the romantic part of my proposal

Well that’s sweet now isn’t it? So Mary if you are out there and you see this marry this shmuck proposal to mary . I mean dang, he has registered a domain and dedicated a website to this cause of pure fate. Hey reader, yea YOU! What do you think his chances are? Leave us a comment and tell us and if you want go ahead and pass his story along as well because he surely needs all the help he can get and fast.

Earlier on this week I had read an article describing how Google has recently started dropping websites PR due to paid links being located in the websites yet Google themselves offer pay for link services. Right off the bat that hits a nerve with me. So then I started to wonder why do they have such an issue with this? I’ll tell you the only reason I could see is money. The more sites that run their own advertising campaigns the less money for Google and in an event like this we all would get the idea that they want a monopoly and would ultimately phase every one of us out if they had their way about it.

So now with thinking about this and the ramifications that will come with it we take a look at our own advertising methods. We ourselves run our own advertising campaigns and we do sell links and other space on our websites. The reason we handle most of our advertising in house as we do is this.

How many times have you gone to a website and found that they have advertising running on it and low and behold guess what that advertising on your (family oriented) website is showing. Viagra!!! Or some form of adult content that believe it or not is against the TOS of the advertising agency in the first place yet the ads still show. This is not entirely the fault of the advertising services since the good ones do offer an adult filter, which however never really works either.

So now with all these issues with using Google and other services like theirs we have had to drastically limit what shows with the adult filters and even had to remove some advertising agencies advertisements altogether. So now what do we do with all the negative results and loss in revenues? Simple we sell our own advertising. We offer it for less than it is worth ultimately giving the advertiser a huge deal since we eliminate the middle man and price our links below their worth.

And now you may wonder what is the point? That is simple.
A: We get to monitor specifically who is or is not allowed to run advertising on our website making the ads that do show much more relevant than they would be using a 3rd party.
B: We get an accurate record of what ads were clicked. This is serious here. According to our records for clicks on ads there are ad services that owe us a heck of allot more than they have record of or plan to make payouts for.
C: We control the look of the ads therefore we are able to stop them from breaking our pages layout and causing validation errors.

Now after reviewing why we handle the majority of our advertising in house and not finding any issue with it since it is no different than an advertising block purchased in a newspaper which the biggest ads or the ones in higher read areas cost more then the ones that are read less or in the back of the newspaper we made the decision to continue with our methods as they have been and worked for us and if Google and or any other search engines have an issue with this may they be forewarned. Stop while you are ahead or suffer the consequences. We the people of the web are what made you and we can break you in less time then it took you to get where you are now! Oooooh, sounds like a threat… Well it is not, it is a solid promise. At this point we do not really even give two cents about pr or traffic ranking. That is all made up nonsense anyway. We have been receiving a minimum of over 1000 viewers for a slow month on Asylum-ET alone and the majority are not coming from any of the big search engines anyway. Instead they come from online communities that send us traffic that want to find us.

Just the same though after taking a look at this and then going to Google to read their page about pr and then also noticing that our pr has not dropped but instead spiked up not only on this website but 3 others as well which we use the same methods on, I think it is safe to say that the person(s) who wrote the article where way off base and yes their website may have lost some pr but it had nothing to do with selling links directly.

What is very well likely though is that it could have had something to do with just whom these links were sold to so I recommend doing as we do and do not just sell links to anyone. You should only offer them to those who have relevant content and purpose. I mean seriously this is our whole purpose for being here at Asylum-ET.

We are working to give viewers a place they can come and find entertainment related items such as bands or djs so unlike some of our competitors who have a dui lawyer link right next to your entertainment businesses listing we have entertainment related listings only. Also by being selective of who you allow listings to the value of your listings goes up because they are not diluted with irrelevant garbage.

Recently I had been out of work in desperate need of any little bit of money I could scrape up. I had been searching high and low to find something when I happened upon Scriptlance.com

I was so excited to find a website like this that appeared to be legitimate and user friendly. After about 30 minutes from the time I signed up I found a job that I placed a bid for $75.00 on. I think it was a day later I was awarded the bid on it and my work commenced. I completed the project in an extremely short amount of time and the Webmaster who needed this work done was so impressed that he even threw in a $25 tip so he paid me a total of $100. Not to bad. Or so I thought. So here it is over a week later and I still have not seen payment from scriptlance who is holding my payment.

When I tried to make a withdrawal the website told me that I would have to wait 7 days since I have a new account. For what purpose is really beyond me except for this one thing. They want to hold your money as long as possible since for every day it is in their account and not yours it is interest in their pockets at your expense. I contacted Scriptlance and 3 days later I finally get a response asking me what method of payment I would like to use. That’s it. Nothing else so it is as if they did not even really read the email I sent them but rather just browsed it and saw oh “payment issue” and didn’t read anything else. So I sent a reply telling them to please use paypal.

It has been a few days since then and I have yet to hear back from them. I dropped them another message in their support ticket area yesterday and have not received a response from that yet either. I have noticed that the website now says that payments made via paypal take 3 days to process. I personally use paypal as a payment gateway and I have never seen such a thing in all the payments I have sent and received. After all this I decided I had better go back and take a very close look at their TOS to find out what the deal is. So what do I find in the Terms of Service? Something altogether different from everything else the website has told me.

The TOS states “New members cannot withdraw funds within 30 days of their first project payment.” If I had been aware of this in the signup process I would not have even bothered with signing up. After dealing with Scriptlance over the past few weeks now I have to say that my review of them would be that the website looks inviting but it appears to be a one man show and the one man just can not handle the workflow that running a website such as this requires. They appear understaffed and their professionalism when it comes to expediently processing support requests or anything else for that matter seems to just be non-existent. I would not recommend using the services provided by this site and furthermore the webmaster that I had done the work for and myself will never use this website again after this.

I have this friend who always gets me going on the Mac vs. PC kick. He is still a bit in the newb phase of using Macs since OS X is his first experience with the Macs. My first computer experience dates back to about 1992 or so using Win 3.1 and since then I have used every OS that M$ has released. My first Mac experience was with what I like to refer to as the byte cruncher using OS 7.5. Why byte cruncher? Well it always sounded as though it were eating bytes for breakfast every time you would walk away from it. So now I should get on with my story. This friend of mine, he speaks ever so highly of his experience with Mac and has every bit of harshness towards M$ products complaining of the blue screen of death and driver issues. I have a PC that I paid a base price of $600.00 for and then added a few hundred in parts I already had and a few new ones.

I installed Windows XP 993 days ago now do the math, that’s just a bit shy of 3 full years on one install. Never have I had to run a system restore or any such bothersome routines. I manually update and weed out the updates that are unnecessary for my system, run a reliable ant virus and so on. As for crashes and reboots, only if I intend to crash it does this machine crash and reboots well that depends on the user and what they install but all of mine have been scheduled and have gone with very little down time as an effect. Speaking of downtime how about the flipside. Would you believe me if I told you that up until the show I just played at requiring use of this machine so therefore requiring it to be shut down this Windows XP machine had 4.5 months of solid uptime.

Unbelievable as it may be it is easily obtainable. Get your configurations right and don’t mess with things and if you do make sure you know what the heck you are doing and even then mistakes can be made. 99.9% of all issues with a ANY computer be it PC, Mac or whatever are what is referred to as PEBKAC and for all those who are unaware of what that means it is simple. Problem exists between keyboard and chair

A while back we made a post to inform everyone of the new framework we intended on using here on Asylum-ET. We created a new domain to use as a test bed for the framework. So far it has been about 2 months that we have been running the new domain with this new website in place and so far it has gone rather well. There are still a few little quirks and details to be worked out but it is functional and we encourage all of our users here that are in a band or are dj’s, caterers or photographers to stop over to Entertainment Tonight . Org and sign up for a listing as soon as possible. Come and check us out and let us know what you think.

As soon as we see a large enough response and are able to decide if the framework is just right then we will be putting it into place here as well.