Although I enjoy building and designing website structures and templates, the vast majority of the “Get Rick Quick” and “I don’t care about facts” mindsets people convey incited me to think twice about entering this profession. The lack of knowledge in these circles is astounding. Some ignoramuses who don’t know the first thing about coding websites and designing databases think terms like dofollow and “Off Page Optimization” are legitimate. Other fools still believe Visible PageRank is an accurate measurement tool in anything. And some decide to defend these positions vigorously.

Unbelievable!

If I can take away one thing from posting on “forum debates” and elsewhere however, it’s that conversing with people that have next to no experience on website building and a lackluster understanding on simple concepts like HTML structure is an absolute time-waster.

It’s not about “agreeing with everything I say” or “using only my methods”, doing so for the sole purpose of agreeing with someone doesn’t have any logic to it. But when their views are challenged with hard evidence and facts, they choose to either make personal attacks, bury their heads in the sand and mumble “Blah, blah, blah”, or continue to follow the words of self-proclaimed experts and listen to their gospel like sheep. Seriously, it’s like debating with four year olds.

If you want the state of the industry summed up in a nutshell, heed this quote from Adam Senour (one of the few people online that I still hold a great deal of respect for):

One person starts lie that sounds good.
People believe lie that sounds good.
People promote lie that sounds good as ultimate solution.
If someone comes along and either questions lie or argues that lie is not ultimate solution, people must resort to aspect of lie that sounds most applicable to question.
If no applicable aspect of lie can be found, resort to randomly-selected training-binderesque aspect of lie that has nothing to do with actual problem in attempt to confuse.

In other words, lie, and when called out, create intentionally vague environment.

So the bottom-line here is basically, it’s pointless trying to educate people that refuse to listen or want to be helped. I’ll still continue my WordPress business I started a few months back, and I’ll be happy to answer genuine newbie questions on my forums. However when it comes to forum discussions or other forms of debates on Web Development tactics, SEO, or whatever else, I’m done trying to otherwise “help”. I’m tired of explaining things in a vacuum.

I get the Fucking Red Ring of Death!!! Again!

The console wasn’t moving, it wasn’t overheating, and the power supply box (nor the system itself) wasn’t even on the ground. It came out of nowhere.

For the few years I’ve owned a 360, I’ve gotten this error Three Damn Times! And each time it had to be repackaged and sent back to Microsoft for a few hundred dollars. As if those greedy bastards didn’t make enough money off of just hardware and software sales alone, they had the gull to charge customers for repairs. Sure they may have offered an extended warranty for now, but then they retracted it, assholes.

Every time I see those smarmy lights flashing at me, I just want to throw the system into the jaw of a Microsoft Executive. And this time is no different.

And if that wasn’t enough, I can’t even play computer games properly on my computer anymore.

Take for example, “Star Wars: Empire at War”. The game is already a few years old and I was looking forward to trying it out for awhile. I get through the copy’s installation process and am just about to launch the game, only to find out my computer doesn’t meet the correct processing requirements.

My computer has an Intel Celeron 2.7 Ghz CPU. SW: EaW requires at least a 1.0 Ghz CPU from either an Intel Pentium III or an AMD Athlon processor. Are you kidding me? The damn thing only runs on TWO Specific Processor-types? What complete bullshit!

Really? How can one of the largest computer companies in the world manufacture such shitty hardware? Or how can certain games “require specific processors”? I’m seriously considering just boycotting the industry altogether. (At least until corporations pull their heads out of their collective greedy asses and start thinking about the consumer for once.)

Bah! There’s nothing that can be done.

Let me start by saying that I’m right handed, but I play all First Person Shooters (FPS) and adventure games left-handedly. I have been using southpaw control configuration ever since Rare released Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64 (It was actually the game that got me interested in FPS’s).

After reading rave reviews for Mass Effect, and the thought of actually getting to fly a spaceship throughout the galaxy in a non-linear story fashion was a terrific concept. I thought I was going to have loads of fun, then I started my search through the game menus to adjust the settings to my liking, and guess what? That’s right, only four options pertaining to gameplay.

FOUR options? THAT’S IT?!?! What a joke. You’d think in the year 2008 with all the advanced gaming technology, computer programming capabilities, graphic designs, and hard drive space, that the developers could take an hour or two and assign some user-selectable control features; but nooooooo, you can’t even prioritize what is arguably the most important factor during gameplay, you know, controlling your character.

The Bigger Picture

These companies don’t take their customers very seriously. Take for example tech support. You spend days searching through and posting on company forums and FAQs, spend an hour on the phone only to be put on hold for another hour so that the tech rep can tell you he doesn’t have an answer for you, and you’ve just realized you’ve pissed away a week searching for an answer to which would result in pissing away even more time (having fun) playing the game.

Accountability?

I think it’s about time for arrogant game developers to stop discriminating against players while simultaneously getting their heads out of their asses to spend a few minutes programming the features in. Don’t they realize that there’s a whole demographic of other gamers that use alternative control schemes for just about every genre?

I was able to muster through Knights of the Old Republic with the default controls, barely. (Though this is only because it didn’t require quick reflexes and precision to aim and shoot and such.) Not offering personalized customization is a bad move BioWare, a BAD MOVE for everyone.

All I’m asking for here is a downloadable patch or something to accommodate control schemes that offer players the most comfortable experience possible. How can I possibly enjoy a game if it controls like shit?

Don’t you game developers realize there is a potential win-win situation for both of us here? Not only will there be:

• Happy Customers who can play a game as comfortably as possible,
• But you’ll also get more business and increased revenue in game sales

This doesn’t go for just BioWare though, there are other games I’ve played that have been ruined by crappy controls, like Splinter Cell and Bioshock for example. To be fair though, it isn’t just the game developers who are at fault, the publishers more than likely have a hand in this as well. With the constant schedule deadlines, financial expectations, and all the developmental timelines they set, it’s no wonder great games don’t come along very often.

At least Some Understand

How hard would it be to program a few custom control schemes into the game? Not very, I imagine. This is one of the features I LOVE about Quake 4 (and Doom 3), they offer a completely customizable control system. Any button can be used for reloading or shooting, hell I could even Left Trigger to Jump if I wanted to.

I can say the same thing about the Halo franchise (my favorite shooter genre of all time at the moment). While every button may not be programmed for any feature the player wishes, Bungie still included a plethora of options for both thumbstick AND button layouts. Let me tell you, if it didn’t I sure as hell wouldn’t have played Halo’s two sequels, and I doubt the series would have anywhere near the magnitude it currently holds without these specific control features.

Allow me to give a big thanks to ID software for RECOGNIZING that there are southpaw (and legacy) players out there, and it makes sense to offer these choices because over 10% of the population are left-handed by default, not to mention the rest of us who chose to learn to play FPS’s with southpaw layouts.

Microsoft did take a step in the right direction though, by adding the universal game control feature to the Xbox 360 dashboard. However this can be easily overridden by the game’s programming, which means most, if not all, game developers can ignore it if they wish. (Thank God The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was affected by this feature, or else that game would have been shipped back to the stores too; and guess what, playing the game with southpaw controls made it that much more ENJOYABLE.)

At least Southpaw Legacy (formerly altcntrlgmr.com) gets the situation, and was a great resource of information available for use to find out which games support different controls and which don’t. Should we follow in Southpaw Legacy’s footsteps, and hold game developers and publishers to industry quality standards? I say yes.

I was thinking about purchasing a rewired game controller from Llama due to the fact I find it nearly impossible to play with the default controls. And I sure as hell knew I couldn’t solder the damn thing myself using their hardware guide, even if I tried. Besides this would violate the 360 controller’s warranty, if something were to go wrong (which definitely would in this situation, given my hot-wiring skills). But unfortunately they have been discontinued due to their high demand (gee, I wonder why?). However even if they were available, I probably wouldn’t purchase one anyway, given the high price tag these things had.

Just do the fact that a company like Llama exists should tell the video game industry something (Hint: It has to do with the horrible gamers have to choose from). Maybe if the devs put a little more thought into the economics of the industry, and just how many gamers are left behind in the dust, they wouldn’t have such a bad reputation (from my point of view, that is).

Until companies like BioWare start taking their customers more seriously, I won’t be purchasing any future video game titles from them. It’s too bad too, you could’ve earned another $50 bucks from me purchasing your game, unfortunately you chose to ignore people that have different playing styles.

Thanks for nothing, Game Developers.

(UPDATE = 6/19/2009)
OK, I really need to update this post. Despite the initially clumsy controls, I still desperately wanted to play the game, so I spent a few weeks honing my skills with the game.

I learned that Mass Effect’s layout is a lot like Splinter Cell’s control scheme in that respect, which I already WAS familiar with.

I’m already on my third playthrough, and overall it’s a damn fine game. If BioWare would just give more freedom through control options, coupled with the vastly intriguing storytelling and large, quantitative replay value, they would have a Gaming Masterpiece.

]]> http://www.lightningshock.com/2008/05/26/what-the-hell-no-southpaw-controls/feed/ 10 http://www.lightningshock.com/2008/04/04/anyone-else-sick-and-tired-of-the-domain-name-business/ http://www.lightningshock.com/2008/04/04/anyone-else-sick-and-tired-of-the-domain-name-business/#comments Fri, 04 Apr 2008 07:22:16 +0000 James Lewitzke http://www.lightningshock.com/2008/04/04/anyone-else-sick-and-tired-of-the-domain-name-business/ I know I am. I personally find it frustrating every time I am conducting a name search only to discover that it’s usually been registered by a domain squatter of some kind.

Or are you getting annoyed with pertaining to all the scams and suckers that exist? And those that surf the web looking for the next Get-Rich-Quick Scheme?

I think something should be done about it, but what action should be taken, exactly, I don’t know.

My First Example

As I was searching for a good name for a site that I wanted to write top ten lists around (until finally settling on toptenlisted.com), I stumbled across topten.com, I thought this would be the perfect name for my new website. It’s not being used by anyone, and I find out it’s already taken!

So naturally, I was kind of peeved, but figured someone already conceived the concept of developing top ten lists (this is a whole other matter which I don’t want to ramble to much in this post). And I wanted to figure out what the competition was up to, even if I didn’t think I had any at the time (I was naive, and didn’t do much searching). While visiting the domain, I expected to find a flourishing website with tons of great content, only to discover there’s just a wasted page. That’s right…. all that was there was a search box, a couple of “community links”, and a few random keyword links at the bottom of the page, and I was thinking, “WTF, what is this?”

As my blood pressure rose even more, I decided to do some research into this “registrar”. I find out it is owned by some company known as Mark Monitor Inc.

I don’t know who “Mark Monitor” is, but they are a perfect example of what I hate about the domain business. They gobble up good, memorable domain names and just sit on them waiting for someone with enough cash to pony up, and come by and pay the costs of their heavy fee.

This was about a year ago….

Fast Forward to More Recently, Business is Insane

This domain “cybersquatting” business is huge. A few months ago after reading stories like: “Vodka.com sells for 3 Million” or “Business and ancestry.com acquired for roughly 300 Million a piece“, I’m thinking to myself “Geez, how can people or companies be paying so much for just a .com name?”.

Only the wealthy have access to these dictionary, one-word, top-level domains, and if that doesn’t make you angry, I don’t know what else does.

Crazy Offers

Another thing that bugs me about the domain industry is the people involved in the business and the ludicrous dealings they make.

Take PageRank for example. Some people think you can sell a PR3 Domain, or a Domain with good rankings, so I had to explain to them that this is not possible.

Then there’s also single webpage scams to consider. Some “marketing gurus” purchase entire domains like illmakeyourichthroughafffiliatemarketing.com just to sell their scammy $20 eBook. They’ll claim something along the lines like “Buy my book and I’ll make you rich!”. Here’s a newsflash: THE ONLY PEOPLE GETTING RICH ARE THE ONES SELLING THE EBOOKS. Do you honestly think if they knew how to make money online easily, they’d be giving out their secrets for cheap amounts of cash?!?!

The Leftovers…

There aren’t many good, short domains left, in my opinion. If you want something brief and unique, it’ll have to be something like sda48fs5ud.com. Yeah, just a bunch of random letters and numbers thrown together, not very appealing nor memorable.

Anybody looking to start their own website won’t have that many options within the domain field, unless your willing to fork out the extra cash to pay for a reasonable name, but most aren’t (or can’t afford to).

What Should be Done about this?

I consider myself LUCKY to have been able to register lightningshock before anyone else (whether it’s a domain company, a one person cybersquatter, or just a competing website developer) had the opportunity to snatch it up (although I wouldn’t feel half as bad if it was the final choice).

I say if you’re going to purchase and sit on a domain for awhile, you should at least put it to use and build a website around it, you know, something pertaining to the domain name.

Or else, I wouldn’t mind seeing a law or two passed and enforced against this travesty of an industry. If nothing is done about it, who knows I might decide to take a complete 180 and start registering spiffy domain names of my own, and see how they like it.

Our alphabet definitely needs work. Take the ‘F’ sound for example. It can be created by the letter ‘F’ and the letters ‘Ph’. Talk about inconsistency. Seriously, why not just call it Telefone, instead of telephone? And to confuse English speaking Newbies even more, we have letters that make more than one sound. Take the letter ‘C’ for example, is this letter really necessary? I mean we already have the letters ‘S’ and ‘K’, so what’s the point behind ‘C’s’ existence?

And how about those different accents and dialects? How many of those do we have in *just* the United States alone? I’ll bet that there must be hundreds. While it may be true that some people use them for cultural reasons, isn’t it at all possible to restructure everyone’s accents or dialects and just cut out the fluff?

One more thing I can’t stand is just how many words we have for the same things. We don’t really need to be calling it the water fountain, drinking fountain, AND the bubbler. Synonyms are one of the biggest screw-ups of the English Language, IMO. I can see now why taking a few courses to learn English must be one of the hardest tasks for non-Native speakers.

Some of you may say, but our historical and geographical distributions cause everyone to speak and correspond with each other differently. Then I’ll remind everyone that we live in the information age, and with tools like wireless communications and the internet, I don’t see how it could be very hard to do something about it.

The English language speakers still don’t seem smart enough to create a well-known, easy to learn phonologic communication system. Some major English revisions are overdue in my opinion, as consistency is the key to a great language.

They’re willing to sit next to you every day of class work together on everything, they get close to you, they flirt and touch you suggestively, you spend hours together outside the classroom, you even ask them out, yet they don’t have the courtesy to tell you they’re not interested.

They don’t tell you if they’re in a relationship until after they’ve got their claws dug so deep into your soul there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. They mention it like it’s nothing.

Then they accuse you of having problems via social settings, friendship, etc. What’s so wrong with developing feelings for someone?!?!? Especially when you have felt really close to them over the past few months.

Then after all the air is cleared and you don’t let there be any smokescreens or random thoughts between you two, they still don’t give you proper closure.

At least, on very rare occasions, some do have the courtesy of agreeing never speaking to you again.

My point I’m trying to make here is don’t EVER fall for someone unless you are certain they express an interest in you and you know that they like you back. DON’T listen to women and their problems their having when they don’t respect you. And most certainly DON’T build up the idea of the perfect woman in your head when they’re probably just as cold and calculating as you’d expect them to be.

To help potential “Page traders” understand what these are, I’ve drawn a few diagrams for illustration:

This is what is what it’s suppose to be like. But there’s always idiots and schemers out there that can’t create decent enough material themselves.

In my opinion, if you literally have to ask others to “Digg” your article, or “stumble” across a few pages from your site, then it is not worthy of the so-called rank, or whatever SEO Experts, PageRankers, etc. are seeking. What’s so hard to understand about that?

1. It’s Spammer infested
2. They think Google’s Toolbar PageRank is important (which it’s not)
3. They think submitting to Web Directories is important
4. They think Reciprocal Link Building is important
5. They think Article Submissions are important
6. They think Press Releases are important
7. They think submitting via Social Bookmarks is important
8. They actually applaud participation in Link Programs
9. No creative Forum Icons
10. They think “Google is Evil”
11. They promote splogs
12. They promote Espionage
13. They promote Link Scheming
14. They promote Blackhat SEO techniques
15. They promote Stumble Exchanges
16. They promote Digg Exchanges
17. They promote Clickbank Posts
18. It sits on a sub-domain
19. It’s too big
20. Members have tried to sell their accounts
21. Trying to filter all the good posts from the bad posts is like finding a needle in a haystack
22. They actually have an “Interesting Junk” dropdown menu in their forum toolbar (Under “Fun Stuff”)
23. Reputation is disabled in the “Members List”
24. For DP: Quantity > Quality
25. Their “Greenish” Color Scheme reminds me of Vomit
26. Their Link Exchange / Sales Forums have over 460,000 posts
27. They banned Alexander the Great
28. They have an entire forum devoted to Keyword Tracking
29. The Administrators don’t care about the quality of the forums
30. The Moderators don’t care about the quality of the forums
31. They hire paid forum posters
32. Just look at some of Nintendo’s Pictures
33. They ban members for silly reasons (like thread bumping)
34. They got banned from Stumble Upon
35. There’s a”Politics and Religion” sub-forum, it’s suppose to be a webmaster forum
36. Everything is about links, links, and more links to them
37. Insults seem to be tolerated (like here)
38. Just looking at the site hurts my eyes
39. Threads often go off-topic
40. Don’t Piss off Crazy_Rob, he’ll ban you
41. They actually have a “Personal Attacks” Sticky, as if insults weren’t obviously bad.
42. Copy and Pasted Articles flourish
43. Too many self-promo threads
44. Too many link-drop threads
45. Some members are arrogant, and believe competing communities are jealous.
46. They condescend towards Doug Heil as if his IHY community is second-rate
47. Lots of cell phone spam
48. They overvalue “Article Marketing”
49. Many new webmasters get sucked into their logic
50. Profanity filter is turned off
51. Their logo’s odd
52. You can’t even make out what’s underneath their logo (it looks something like a barcode)
53. All their “Google” Stickies relate to PR
54. People who generally try to help others out go relatively unnoticed
55. Their membergroups are insulting (Peon, Grunt, etc.)
56. They have over 500 self-proclaimed “SEO Experts“
57. The forums look nothing like the main site
58. Their forum design is uninspiring
59. They don’t care who they ban, even high-ranking contributing members
60. HTML isn’t a sub-forum of programming, like the rest of the web languages
61. There is no moderation accountability
62. There is barely any reputation accountability
63. They actually have a marketplace for website traffic, as if having something to unique to offer your visitors isn’t enough
64. Sorting through the filth gives me a headache
65. Members get super freaked out when DP goes offline
66. The guy who wrote the Reputation FAQ is banned
67. “Who’s Online” options are severely limited
68. The forum’s “Get-rich-quick” logic undermines the purpose of the web and internet
69. Some actually try to sell blackhat methods to newbies
70. It gives off a “Creepy, Slyish” vibe
71. Definitely not enough moderation for a board their size
72. They don’t welcome new members well (usually you get a welcome PM from an admin, but not from DP)
73. They are arrogant enough to have their own “DPified” Google FAQ
74. Allowing users to switch between vBulletin styles makes the site look unprofessional
75. Many threads aren’t even posted in the right forums
76. They have no Design & Development stickies. Wouldn’t some coding resources be useful for creating a “good” website?
77. They have a “Legal Issues” forum, anyone else detect the oxymoron?
78. The site’s owner (Shawn) isn’t even active much on the forum, (I doubt he even has that much influence anymore)
79. Popular ≠ Valuable
80. Absolutely no forum for “Site News and Updates” can be found
81. There’s no specific DP copyright info for the forums (it should be at the bottom, near the vB copyright info)
82. It’s server is often slow
83. Limited selection of “Digital Point Solutions Tools”
84. “Forum Jump”, for the most part, is *pointless*
85. Everything’s about money over there (with entire forums dedicated to affiliate programs and PPC advertising, not to mention the 2,000,000+ posts in the DP marketplace)
86. They have two seperate sub-forums for Google Adwords
87. Whitehat SEO is virtually nonexistent
88. Web hosting is also virtually nonexistent
89. Read this post
90. Or read this post
91. Many members’ signature links are filled with pointless links with anchor text such as “PR4 Link Exchange” or “Hot Thai Girls”, etc.
92. Their Directory forum is underneath the “Search Engine” Category, do they even know what a Directory is?
93. No web marketing advice for long term site stability
94. For allowing usernames like FuckingPirate and Shittywall to exist
95. They tend to be hypocritical (they don’t mind manipulating sites like Digg and Stumbleupon, but when it comes to Ethical Legal Issues, there’s nothing pertaining to internet marketing)
96. Their spammy ideas and link schemes sometimes spill over into other forums
97. Difficult to understand the site name, and how it relates to the web
98. The community doesn’t collectively care about long-term website worthiness
99. Did I mention it’s a spammer heaven yet?
100. A community containing that much filth isn’t worthy of all the backlinks gained from this blog post

I could probably have come up with more, but I’m too tired to think right now.

(UPDATE 4/20/2008 = I’ve opened up a new blog post about this list over here, so all questions and comments should be directed there.)

For example, look at this guy:

He’s Joesph Marcell, you may recognize him as the Butler, Geoffrey from the Fresh Prince. Some people think he’s Africa-American, and those people are idiots. Firstly, he was born in the Caribbean, and second, he’s a citizen of the United Kingdom.

I think people really need to loosen up when it comes to “Race classification”, or whatever you want to call it. Who cares if someone is considered Caucasian, African-American, Asian-American, etc.? It’s the persons themselves that matter, not where they’re from, or what they look like.

People who are easily offended by racial stereotypes have much bigger issues they should deal with rather than bitching all the time about someone classifying them by the color of their skin.