(Moderator's note: the following was posted by an employee of Viacom, which owns the site that is being promoted. -DZ)

I just found this really cool trivia site for all you pop culture junkies out there called WorldOfPop.com. They have a ton of cool games – my favorite is Too Many Questions, where you have 4 answers but a ton of questions and you have to match them up. I thought I was really good at trivia, but some of these questions totally had me stumped!
Also, I heard they are gonna to have a game called Triviadome where you can actually win cash prizes. I heard that next Friday they are going to have a grand prize game with a $10,000 reward. Has anyone else heard about this?

Just thought I’d share!

Actually, you didn't "just find" it, your company runs it.

This forum has many fans of the World Series of Pop Culture. As such, please feel free to be yourself -- we'd welcome an inside perspective.

I LOL'ed. =D

Ha! So is advertisers writing to chatrooms and forums posing as real people still a big thing, or has the average citizen figured it out?

I ask as someone in advertising who hopes 30-second filmed commercials become hot again.

Hah. Pwned.

Actually, no, I'd rather he went away, since he pretty much tainted himself as a useful member of the forum by pulling this little stunt. Certainly I don't have the first ounce of trust in anything he says going forward.

Quality stuff. Just about the worst forum on the Internets to post this.

Whether or not the average citizen has figured it out, I'm pretty sure it's still fairly common. I speak from firsthand knowledge, as posts fitting your description pop up every now and then and I have to delete them.

Guerrilla marketers, much like their brethren on the evolutionary food chain, car salesmen, are under the almost-always-false assumption that they are always smarter than their prey.

Sadly, it still works a lot of the time, because, as you can see just by looking around you, there are some REALLY stupid people on the Internets.

Frankly, I'm surprised that GSNFAN3000 didn't beat you to the punch in his haste to award the site six gajillion thumbs up.

(It's also very possible that the jackbag doesn't care since he got his site plug in and the message is still there. For that reason I dunno if just deleting this thread outright is such a bad idea. At the MINIMUM, I think I'd edit an addendum to the guy's post to make it clear that he's shilling and not just some disinterested user like he claims to be.)

I particularly enjoyed the complete-with-exclamation-point "gosh, I'm stumped" line. And the conspiratorial, "have-you-heard" tone. Classic and outdated at the same time.

I like playing trivia games.

I am never going to worldofpop.com.

I thought it said "worldofpoop.com".

It would be interesting to see if his bosses condoned this, or if they would rip him a new one if this was some overzealous dimwit who thought that representing his company like this would be a good idea.

Otherwise known as alt.tv.game-shows.

Ooh, well done editing the thread subheading, Dave.

Thanks. :-) I didn't think a wholesale deletion was warranted -- some of our members may find the recaps on the site useful.

You're probably right. The "you ought to make it clear this is a shill" idea came to me after I wondered aloud about deleting the thread at all.

This guy posted the same thing at the GSN boards. I wonder why he does not want us to know its his?

Because he wants us to think he's just a regular game show fan who found a great site to share, rather than a guy who's just shilling for his bosses.

I was going to say he had good taste in targets - at least until I saw he was on the other boards.

I guess that pretty much seals the deal that he's an asshat spammer. If there was any doubt to start with.

(Betcha they fall for it hook, line, and sinker over there.)

It seems Brendy deleted that thread over there.

The Password is "Astroturf". *DING*

Hey! Be nice.

-M

Why? nobody did over there...

Given both the quality of the "discussions" there nowadays, and the favorite topic of discussion among the group's most prolific "contributors," I'd say the name is perfect.


And they still aren't.

I agree with the spammer part, but if he's an asshat, then what do you consider a spambot?

Huh?

It was an honest question. See, I've been on boards that have had plenty of spam posts, but this feels more pre-meditated than bots. Sure, he's two-faced and all that, but I've seen worse.

Great. I still don't know what in the blue hell you're asking.

Basically, he's asking if you consider spambots worse than people who post spam. Which is a silly question, because a spambot doesn't appear spontaneously out of nowhere -- obviously someone has to decide to write one, and someone has to decide to use it.

An asshat spammer is still an asshat spammer, whether he's manually posting the messages one at a time or using a spambot to do it automatically.

Oh. Ok. Yeah, I didn't want to roll my eyes until I, ya know, actually knew what the hell he was asking. So, with that:

wow.

Thank God I've installed Zink 2.0, which will let me translate and foreign language or crap I don't undertstand.

I get a lot of Asian porn spam though. That's a tradeoff for Zink being freeware.

Obviously you need the Zink 3.0 upgrade:


Not only won't you make those errors, you'll get much more diverse porn spam. ;-)

I'm tired today.

Spam or not, Too Many Questions *is* a fun trivia game-- certainly the best of the five available on worldofpop, and actually a fresh spin on trivia that I haven't seen before. Recommended, despite the spammer.

Glad you like it. My experience on the site has been filled with technical bugs and discovering that many of the trivia answers are incorrect. (Don't get me started on the typos.) It's told me for three days running that I can't play a game because I'm "already logged into another window." There is no visible tech help contact on the site to find out how to correct this; logging out and even re-starting the computer does no good. I'm not going back.

John (speaking of typos, I initially inserted an H into the word "site"...Freudian slip.)

So far, my experience is that the Too Many Questions database seems to be ok. But you're right, a lot of the rest of the games are completely broken crappe.

I was playing Camouflage at the GSN site yesterday and the clue "It turns a room mushy" worked out to be "shiitake", which they spelled with a single "I". I lol'd.

-M

Is that the "Who's Face is It?" game?

John

Danny Thomas's first, and less successful, attempt at comedy.