If you visit any gaming-related sites, you've probably seen advertisements for a browser-based strategy game called "Evony." No, I won't link it, for reasons that will become obvious. The advertisements emphasize three primary themes: (1) boobs, (2) boobs, and (3) the ability to "play discreetly," by which I think they mean at work without getting fired. (Good luck with that. As an employer familiar with computers and loafing, please be informed that you are not as clever as you think you are, and I am not as dumb.)

Browser games are a fun diversion. We've recommended many here. I've played many of them. I like strategy games, and I love the Civilization series on which Evony is apparently heavily based. I'm the target audience for this thing.

But I will never, in a million years, play it, and I will suggest that others avoid it like the plague.

Why? Well it's not, as Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror suggests, because Evony's entirely boob-based advertising treats me like a drooling 14-year-old. I drink beer, after all; it would be hypocritical to complain about that.

No, it's because for the last few weeks Evony has been deluging us with obnoxious comment spam:

I just started playing this new game called evony. It’s pretty sweet I think you guys would like it. Just a simple little flash game, but damn its addicting. You can sign up for an account at [ ].

I just found this cool new game called evony. Check it out at []

And so on. They're automatically posted here in the comments to game-related posts, sometimes as often as dozens of times a day.

Let's get this straight. Online pharmacies and questionable purveyors of herbal remedies advertise by comment spam. Substances and devices allegedly capable of improving my dick advertise by comment spam. Porn sites advertise by comment spam. Nigerian princes advertise by comment spam. Fraudulent financial services advertise by comment spam. Sites designed to cripple your system with malware and viruses advertise by comment spam.

Legitimate business, and legitimate sites, do not advertise by comment spam. I associate comment spam with the underbelly of the web, with fraud and crime and child porn and things that will break my computer in ways I am too dumb to understand. Why would I possibly go to a site that advertises this way? Am I that stupid? Maybe Evony's site won't inflict malware on my computer. But I won't take that chance. Given the company Evony has chosen to keep, you shouldn't either.

Edit: I see that Bruce on Games is annoyed by the same thing.

Recently we at Popehat have been receiving many emails from people offering to help drive more traffic to our modest site. They urge us not to be content with our existing search engine traffic, which may very charitably be described as eccentric. Rather, they want us to unleash the power of teh internets by "optimizing" our site for search terms that are key to our enterprise. (Possible examples: "snark" "conceited assholes" "off-brand small-l libertarian wankery" "geekish effluvia").

So, are professional search engine optimizers — or internet marketing specialists, or keyword rankers, as some call themselves — deliberately targeting the big-side-of-tiny/smaller-side-of-small blog market? Is there money in the narcissistic ramblings of frustrated writers in the blogosphere?

Well, no. Most of these marketing emails by SEOs are, as far as I can tell, spam generated by automated Google searches.

Take, for example, Jamie Spottz and PeakSearchEngineRanking.dork. Okay, it's actually .net. But I didn't want to link him directly.

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