Well dang it all to heck. Despite my stated goal to make a news post every week, the last two news posts were a month apart. And... it's been more than a month between the last news post and this one. I am not doing well about meeting my goals.

To be fair, there are reasons for that. (Wait, who am I being fair to? Myself, I guess, but obviously I'm far too biased for that to really be practicable.) I've got a lot of things I've got to set in order that are taking up a lot of time right now, but it'll pay off in a few months. Which means I have virtually no free time now, but in a few months that will change and I should have no trouble keeping on target. That's not to say I'm still not going to try for weekly updates in the meantime; it just means there are reasons I'm not making them.

But yeah, wow, I really haven't been getting much done on the Wongery lately. Not only was there a month between updates, but there was only one new article posted. To be—well, to be monumentally biased toward myself; let's be honest—that article was an unusually time-consuming one, because it introduced a new world (Ranthis, to be precise), and articles about new worlds are typically meaty and complicated. On the other hand, (a) the article isn't credited to me, it's credited to Oscqr, but as I've mentioned before I do edit all the articles myself before they're posted, and (b) it's another article from the backlog, not freshly written, but, well, I still had to edit it. Still... okay, it's not like that took that long, and yeah, it's still pretty pathetic to only have one new article in the last month.

(And yes, I did say that we were maybe going to try to cut back on introducing so many new worlds in favor of further developing the worlds that already have articles, but, well, like I said, this one was already written and on the backlog to be posted; seemed pointless to just throw it away. Which isn't necessarily to say there won't be other new worlds posted before the hard launch in December. I know we should post fewer new worlds and devote more energy to developing existing ones, but that doesn't mean we'll necessarily stick to that.)

That's not to say I didn't get anything else done on the Wongery, though. Well, okay, I didn't get much done, but I did clean up the forums again... yeah, there had been a bunch more spam posts since the last cleaning (and at some point I really do need to look into implementing a better CAPTCHA or CAPTCHAesque system). I think, incidentally, I also found out why so many spammers have been flocking to the fora; wongery.net is included on a list of ".net active phpBB forums" posted on a "BlackHat SEO Forum" (which obviously I'm not going to link to). Unfortunately, there's probably not much I can do about that, except perhaps for the parenthetically aforementioned better CAPTCHA implementation.

Anyway, though, there's been a change in the type of spam that's been littering the forum. The spam has always seemed to go through phases; for a while there were tons of posts about Ugg boots, for instance. Now, though, I'm seeing a lot of posts like the following:

Good day .

I found your forum very attractive and promising. I want buy advertising space for a banner in the top of the site , for $ 300 per month. Pay I will be through WebMoney, 50% immediately, and 50% in 2 weeks. And yet, the address of my site [URL redacted] - will it not contradict the topic? Thank you!

Send a letter about your decision to me in the PM or to the mail [gmail address redacted]

And when I say "like the following", I mean exactly like that, word for word and punctuation mark for punctuation mark, the only changes being the URL, the email address, and the amount, which ranged from $300 a month to $1500. Oh, and that sometimes it was in Russian.

Доброго времени суток .

Ваш форум мне показался очень привлекательным и перспективным. Хочу приобрести рекламное место для баннера в шапке, за $1500 в месяц. Оплачивать буду через WebMoney, 50% сразу, а 50% через 2 недели. И еще, адрес моего сайта [URL redacted] - он не будет противоречить тематике?

Спасибо! Напишите о Вашем решении мне в ПМ или на почту [gmail address redacted]

Of course, even had it not been for the duplicate messages, and the fact that the same users also posted more blatantly spammy messages, it would have been obvious that this was a scam. Nobody is going to offer $300 a month, let alone $1500, for banner ads on a forum they never looked at. And nobody who looked at the forum could fail to notice that it only had a handful of posts, all by the administrator, and nobody would want to pay banner ads on such a barren forum, either. (Obviously I hope the forum will start attracting legitimate posts after the hard launch, but that's neither here nor there.) I never thought for a moment that there was any chance that this advertising space offer might be legitimate.

But I did wonder what the actual purpose of these messages was. Obviously they weren't really going to pay anything. Was it the classic payment scam where they would pretend to overpay and ask for a refund? Were they just hoping to get some free advertising before I realized their payment didn't go through? (Again, no one would pay to advertise on a forum with no active users, but maybe they thought that if they could get advertisements for free they might as well.) But then I realized eventually I was probably overthinking it. They probably just wanted their posts to show up on the forum so their links were there for SEO purposes. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that. (I don't know for sure whether there wasn't something more to it that I hadn't considered, though; I wasn't curious enough to pretend to fall for it to find out what they'd do.)

Incidentally, it seems like at least some of the spammers might have realized their posts weren't showing up, because the forum also got multiple posts like these, often from the same people who posted the banner ad messages:

How to reply to a topic?

Maybe I'm not writing correctly? Please help.

Yours faithfully.

Or

Can anyone help ??

I can't write to the topic.

Thank you.

Or

Can I contact admin??

I'ts important.

Regards.

Or maybe they didn't notice, but that's just another standard spam message they post on any forum and it just happens to be coincidentally true in this case that their replies weren't showing up (because I didn't let them through moderation). Whatever. Doesn't matter. The posts and users have been deleted in any case.

(...And I just now realized that deleting users from the phpBB database doesn't delete them from the wiki database, so I've got all these inactive spammer users still cluttering up the wiki userlist. Eh, I'm sure there's a simple way to do a mass deletion of users with no contributions, and I'll get around to figuring it out sooner or later.)

But even though this advertising offer was transparently spurious, what would happen if I did get a legitimate request for advertising on the Wongery website? Would I take them up on it? Well, actually, no. I mean, if there was enough money in it I admit I might be tempted, but I'm pretty sure I'd still end up turning it down. I want the Wongery to remain always free and easily accessible, and I want it to also be clean and uncluttered by advertising. That's not what it's for.

That's not to say I have no hope of ever making money from the Wongery. I don't plan or expect to make any money directly from the site itself, but if someone else wants to license some of the IP for some game or movie or other project, that's another matter—in fact, that's something explicitly covered in the Wongery's Licensing page. (Which I really need to update. Especially since, yikes, it still says that all the material in the Wongery mainspace is released under the Open Game License, which I thought I'd removed but I guess I hadn't yet. I'll... remedy that immediately.) And if the Wongery gets popular, I mean I'm not above starting a Patreon or something. Or maybe selling merch. (I don't know what kind of merch we'd sell. Maybe it doesn't make sense to sell merch. I don't know. I'm just blueskying here. I feel weird writing "merch". I don't think I've ever used that word before, and I don't know, it feels kind of sordid, even though rationally I suppose it shouldn't. I also don't think I've ever used the word "blueskying" before, and I'm not at all sure I used it correctly, but I'll leave it in regardless.) But anyway, there will never be any charge for accessing the Wongery, and there will never be any ads on the site.

Well, anyway, I should go ahead and post this before I leave two months between news posts. But after this, I'm really going to try to get to a consistent schedule of at least one post a week. And let's say at least three posts a week (I mean, I'd really like to get to multiple posts a day, but that may not be realistic just yet).

I'm not saying I'm necessarily going to succeed at getting up at least one news post a week, but I'm going to try.

At least I hope not to let over a month pass again...