apr 9
2009

Banned Album Covers

30 controversial album covers. [via]

15 comments

When you left out the word "most," were you making an editorial statement or just being absentminded?

(Say, have you checked out WFMU's Free Music Archive yet? I fully expected to see that link here yesterday!)

posted by CRZ at 3:46 PM on April 9, 2009

No sooner did I hit "Add Comment" than I realised I should have looked at the [via] link first. You just passed along HIS { absentmindedness | editorial decision }. My apologies! (Still, go check out that spam link I just posted.)

posted by CRZ at 3:47 PM on April 9, 2009

Bah again -- Amorica is the "most controversial" album ever?! Have these people ever heard of Blind Faith?

Anyway, I found Pitchfork's "The Worst Record Covers of All Time":http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/6194-the-worst-record-covers-of-all-time/ to at least be redeemed by being entertaining (and towards the end a number of them are fucked up in ways that put these NA's collection to shame. Also, points deducted for the solo-Waters endorsement).

posted by alesh at 5:24 PM on April 9, 2009

I knew that the Beatles original cover for "Yesterday And Today" would be on there. Definitely something gruesome about that, haha.

Also, not sure why my comments were removed as spam - I'm the guy who gave you the heads up about the spammers on Twitter to begin with, and I don't think anything I've posted here would be seen as spam.

posted by ShellMedia at 12:35 PM on April 10, 2009

Defining spam. Yes. I'm still thinking about this.

The problem, I think, has been that I have been relying on context and content. Like the comment you just left -- it's difficult to call it spam.

However, I also know you are here for one reason: to populate my site with your links. So rather than content, I think spam needs to be reevaluated as intent.

In other words, I really doubt you'd be here if you couldn't leave links. So to test this theory, I have removed all self-referential links from your comment.

(I should probably just do this across the site. And I might still...)

posted by Rex at 12:39 PM on April 10, 2009

It goes both ways - I actually enjoy the content of this site, but I think you provide motivation for people to post comments by allowing backlinks. I could see removing comments where the name is "buy viagra cheap" or something along those lines, but I'm simply using the name of my site, not even a competitive keyword.

Context and content - I don't think any of the comments I've left on here could be considered spam. I have a blog of my own (and have had it since the late 90s) and know what it's like to fight comment spam. There's definitely a difference between automated comment spam and people leaving a relevant comment with a URL, and personally I have no issue with the latter.

posted by ShellMedia at 1:00 PM on April 10, 2009

Wouldn't adding a rel="nofollow" or whatever it is solve that problem?

But I agree -- this is getting to be an interesting problem, because people are experimenting to see just how useful/relevant a comment has to be to not be deleted by a given blogger.

By the way, I just checked my referrer stats to see how many page views I get from Fimoculous -- none so far this month, but there were a few in March!

posted by alesh at 1:54 PM on April 10, 2009

No "experimenting" going on here. These aren't carefully crafted comments where I'm walking the line between contributing to the conversation by providing relevant commentary and straight up spam.

But if Rex would prefer that I refrained from contributing from now on, I won't lose any sleep over it either.

Sorry for getting the comments off topic on this post.

posted by ShellMedia at 2:03 PM on April 10, 2009

Well, I want people to comment. The problem is that I now get about 30 pseudo-comments per day -- they're not exactly spam, but I can tell they come from people who are only contributing for SEO reasons.

Stripping URLs or adding nofollow would probably fix it, but I also feel like some people should get the juice for contributing.

The stupid difficult thing is that I'm forced to decide which people they are.

posted by Rex at 2:12 PM on April 10, 2009

As a higher PR site, I'd imagine that you'd tend to get it worse than other sites would. I would definitely understand if you decided to nofollow the links. Though even with nofollowed comments, I still get tons of comment spam - I suppose it's from SEOs who don't know what they're doing?

Why not just ban the IPs of spammers - If the first comment they make is spammy, chances are they won't be contributing anything worthwhile in the future anyway. Then again, it sucks to have a .htaccess file full of IPs. I guess there is no one easy solution.

Also, I understand my earlier comments being removed because you probably just sweeped through and removed comments from anyone unfamiliar who posted during the onslaught of comment spam.

posted by ShellMedia at 4:12 PM on April 10, 2009

Anyone remeber that Janet Jackson cover where she's topless with a man behind her? That was controversial, back in the day. Probably not now though, after her "wardrobe malfunction!"

Alex Taylor

posted by Alex Taylor at 8:29 PM on April 10, 2009

^are comments like the above auto-generated? i'm at a loss for what is going on here... would a simple captcha solve this problem?

posted by ryan at 11:46 PM on April 10, 2009

Why would that be automated? Seems pretty relevant to me. He's pointing out that at the time that a lot of these albums came out they were controversial, but looking at them now they don't seem so bad. Same deal with the Janet Jackson Rolling Stone cover, seemed very controversial in it's time (back in the mid 90's I think?) but seems perfectly acceptable by today's standards.

posted by John at 7:45 PM on April 11, 2009

Well, first off, it wasn't actually an album cover, was it?

Mostly it's probably the same anchored text twice in the same comment. Let me throw you back to a spam discussion from Feb. It's probably not automated per se, but it's more an attempt to make ANY comment, quickly, possibly with as little thought as possible, and get the link out there by any means necessary.

posted by CRZ at 12:41 AM on April 12, 2009

What, no Virgin Killer?

posted by James at 4:20 PM on April 13, 2009




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