The BileBlog

On the whole, theserverside.com is a pretty decent site. It has some mildly interesting articles, the product announcements are relevant, and the editorialising is kept to a pleasant minimum. The technical content is also surprisingly relevant and topical.

The whole thing however is let down by regular baiting and shilling by some users/authors, who seem to go through moments of panic when the comment count drops for a few successive stories.

So what to do in this case? Why, say something controversial! Over the years, TSS has pretty much identified both of the ‘hot’ topics (ie, JBoss, and opensource) as great obsessive fanatic breeding grounds. So when things flag, you can be sure you’ll have some link to a highly dubious article saying one or the other is great (nobody is offended when either is portrayed as not THAT great, interestingly enough).

A particularly funny/offensive example of this was a ‘is JBoss ready for the enterprise’ advert run there a couple of weeks ago. This is supposedly an objective evaluation of said product by some random guy who is trying to determine whether it’s good enough to use, based on some dodgy metrics. Fair enough, nothing too odd about that. The fun bit is when you realise that the author happens to be the CEO of a company that does training and consulting for open source products. Gosh, and he found that some opensource product is in fact ready for the enterprise?! This is NOTEWORTHY to him? I mean really, shouldn’t it be sufficient for him to say ‘my business is all about open source in the enterprise’ for the rest of us to realise that he thinks it’s a good idea?

While much of the blame should be placed on the genius who authorised this offensive article, tss users should also shoulder much of the responsibility.

Cameron, please please stop baiting these poor people. It’s a well documented fact that Gavin Fleury has claimed the deeper shades of purple for his exclusive use lately. The poor guy’s head will at some point explode if you keep taunting him so subtly.

See, one has to understand something about these jboss kids. They’re very, very sensitive. Their favourite movie is When Harry Met Sally. They cry when they hear sad songs, and they blow up when you say their favourite toy isn’t your favourite toy. So why keep baiting them like this? I mean, it’s fun and all, but the novelty value of torturing a bunch of kids wears off fairly quickly. So please, let’s just ignore them and stop their tedious yapping.

It’s pretty sad that TSS regularly lowers its tone by such postings. Perhaps they have some kind of freakish javalobby envy syndrome, and aspire to to scale those admirable heights of crapulence, a dubious goal at the best of times.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2004 at 10:54 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.