gullybogan

Dear Reader,

You may have noticed, as have i, that WordPress appears to have a robot that has nothing better to do than insert ‘possibly related posts’ spam onto the end of my posts.

And, no doubt, many other persons’ posts as well.

How wonderful.

I wonder if there’s a way that doesn’t involve money changing hands that i can turn this rude interjection off.

I’ll let you know what i find, if anything. I’m sure you’ll do the same for me, dear Reader.

Yours,
Gullybogan

UPDATE

Apparently, dear Reader, this spam is a ‘feature’, that is great and wonderful. This is how it works:

In a feature we’re calling possibly related posts we’ll now try to show posts related to yours [in] a little section at the end. If we find any posts on your blog that are related, we’ll put those at the very top and in bold. Next we’ll show other posts from around WordPress.com, and finally we’ll check if there’s anything in the mainstream media.

In response, i left this comment:

I hate it.

It’s spam.

Thankfully i can turn it off.

How long before “and finally we’ll check if there’s anything in the mainstream media” becomes “and then we sell advertising space on your blog to the highest bidder”?

When that happens, i will consider myself to be working for you, and i will expect a paycheque.

I kind of like the way that bloggers link to each other; it’s called ‘community’. I don’t want a robot to do community for me.

Too opinionated?

Meh.

Happily, as i note, you CAN turn it off.

Of course, if you do, you miss out on all that traffic.

If you want to remove the related posts from your blog entirely, just go to Design > Extras and check the box to do so. But if you remove related posts from your blog we’ll remove you from other people’s blogs, so you won’t get traffic from that.

I think that’s called ‘extortion’, but i may be wrong. It may only be blackmail.

Ever yours,
Gullybogan

FURTHER UPDATE

The robot, dear Reader, appears to choose any old post, almost at random.

For this article, about spamming and the dissolution of our rights as bloggers to determine who we link to, the robot has (when i viewed the post) generated links to two articles i wrote about Brunswick Street (???), and some other articles by other ppl which i also doubt are anything to do with freedom of expression.

Good work, WordPress.

So, dear Reader, i’m just off to cancel all the traffic from whomsoever’s blogs the robot is rudely interjecting my post titles into. Let me know if you decide to do the same.

By the way, using the Tag system, you can see what other ppl are writing about topics that you are interested in, and that are POSSIBLY RELATED to your own posts. You can then read those posts by other ppl, and leave comments on those posts, thus generating traffic in the old-school, pre-robot way – by building a community of interest.

Good night, and good luck.

Eternally yours,
Gullybogan