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"Don't bring me down."
- Electric Light Orchestra
As we venture forth into our eighth year of publishing Computor Companion, I think it's time for a little refresher on the name. Periodically, I get emails from some pompous spelling authority about our decision to spell the name of the magazine "computor" instead of "computer." Here's a recent example:
"Why should anyone take as reliable the comments of an outfit which can't spell correctly the simple word computer?"
Of course, these arrogant spelling nuts never seem notice that we spell it computOr consistently throughout a Web site that has literally hundreds of pages. That implies maybe we did it on purpose. (Duh!) Although these people seem to have time to send a nasty email, they don't seem to have time to bother to investigate the FAQ page, which says…
"The theory behind the name is that a computOr is one who computes, as opposed to a computEr, the machine itself. We figure that the machine doesn't need a companion, but maybe the people operating those computers could stand a little sympathy and support. It's not necessarily a real word, but one that's been used a number of times for other magazines. (Linguists might refer to it as a word in transition.)"
Do you suppose these twits who freak out over made-up words send mail to Yahoo, Google, Kleenex, Kodak, or Krispy Kreme (with two misspelled words). I doubt it.
Maybe those companies had the same problem we did. The ComputerCompanion.com domain name wasn't available when we put up this site. (And yes, I've been trying for years to acquire it.) If you'd like to buy it from the domain squatters for me, as a thank you for providing free computer information since 1999, I'd gladly accept the gift.
In any case, I normally just shrug off these dumb emails about the spelling, but frankly, I'm tired of people using our contact forms to send nastigrams. Unpleasant emails are yet another example of what has gone grievously wrong with the Internet over time. When I first went online, newsgroups were filled with helpful people and contact forms were used to actually contact people with useful comments.
The Internet was a kinder, gentler place and Computor Companion grew out of that spirit of helping people. Now, because of spam, no one visits newsgroups anymore. We also get to experience the joy of automated contact form spam.
Contact form spam is a derivative of forum and blog spam. But this type of spamming is so pointless that it is infuriating. Some script goes and dumps links into contact forms in the desperate and pathetic hope that the link might be posted somewhere and someone might click through to the scummy site. In reality, the poor site owner has to filter this dreck from the real requests for information.
I haven't seen any real solutions to this problem. We originally added contact forms to our sites as a way to get more feedback from our audience. But it might be another naive and archaic concept that just won't work in the new "improved" Internet we all get to share now. If this is the kind of thing we get to experience with the much-ballyhooed "Web 2.0," I'd prefer to stick with version 1.0 thank you.
Susan Daffron
Editor
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