Earths Daughter

If this girl doesn't really like you, why would she have hung out with you for eight months and agreed to be your girlfriend? Unless she just wants to have a boyfriend just so she can say she has one. But if she's as beautiful as you say, she could have her pick of other boys. So it sounds like she does probably like you.Some girls are afraid if they talk about stuff that interests them, guys will think it's "girl talk", and not like them. Some girls are just inexperienced or shy, and don't know how to talk to boys. Some girls think if they let a guy talk about himself all the time, the boy will like them more because they're interested in him. Or she could have things going on in her life that she doesn't want to talk about. Maybe her home life is bad. One of her parents could be an alcoholic, abusive, or neglecting her. Try giving her a little time and try to draw her out of her shell. Ask her what her favorite TV shows, movies and foods are. Try to draw her out with your conversation. Of course, it could just be that you got a crush on her because of her looks, and now you're realizing that her personality isn't up to the same level. Some pretty girls think they don't have to be interesting, just because they're pretty. Try looking for a girl that you have a lot in common with, that is interesting to talk to before you ask her to be your girlfriend next time.

I remember going to a website a couple of years ago that showed cartoons that were in Iranian newspapers. The cartoons were extremely insulting to the US, Russia, Israel, and other countries, especially European ones, as well as Christians and Jews. And none of the Muslims were protesting about those being bigoted, blasphemous, intolerant or unfair to Christianity or Judaism. Their cartoons remind me of propaganda put out during WWI and WWII. They were duhumanizing the non-Muslim subjects shown. The purpose of propaganda like that during wars is to make it easier to think of the other side as the enemy, and easier to kill them. It's no wonder there's so many terrorists in the Middle East, the media is putting out war type propaganda. So why should they complain about a few cartoons about Mohammed? They expect everybody non-Muslim to treat Islam with far more concern than they themselves show non-Muslim people and religions. Why do they feel free to insult other countries, cultures and religions, but complain it's unfair and disrespectful if other people do it to them. Why do they expect other people to show more fairness and respect than they do? How can they honestly think their religion and culture is better than everybody elses, when they appeal to other people to act better than they do?"Don't do as I do, do as I say, so you're better than I am." "But I'm still better than you anyway." Isn't that just more than a little bit hypocritical? They're having riots and killing people over a few newspaper cartoons! They claim most Muslims are peaceful people. But these riots are happening all over the world, not with just a handful of extremists in one small place. How peaceful is that? The whole thing has given me a lower opinion of Muslims than I had before. Which wasn't that high because of their lack of belief in human rights, and the way they treat women.

When I was a kid, I always liked summer more because I was out of school and could go swimming and hiking and do outdoor stuff more. But once I was out of school for a couple of years, I came to prefer fall. It's been my favorite season ever since. Summer is too hot, so I sit indoors in the air conditioning more, and the electric bill goes up. lol. I hate running around and sweating a lot. Although a nice hike in the woods is a great thing to do to stay cool when you're outside.Winter is too cold, and I get cold easily, so I tend to stay indoors where it's warm more. And paying heating bills is not exactly one of my favorite things to do. I hate winter, everything looks all grey and dead, even the sky. It's the most depressing season of all.Spring it usually rains more than fall, although it's my second favorite season. It is when the Earth looks reborn, with flowers and greenery coming to life everywhere, marking the end of winter.Fall is the best, though. Not as hot as summer, or as cold as winter, not as wet as spring. Cooler pleasant days days and balmy nights. Beautiful fall colors on the plants. Holidays coming up right around the corner. Lots of fresh produce for sale in the farm markets. Perfect weather for getting out and doing something, like taking a scenic drive or a trip on a scenic railway. Spiced apple cider, pecan pie, harvest wreaths on people's doors. The sight and smell of raked leaves. Watching the squirrels running around gathering nuts. It's just a great time of year. My mood even seems more relaxed than other times of the year during fall. Knowing winter is right around the corner makes me appreciate fall more, and try to get the most out of the last of the year.

Try having a potluck dinner for the Executive Committee. Have people sign up to bring stuff, like appetizers, main course, dessert, etc. Either he won't come, or you can get him to contribute something by bringing something. Make sure it's set up as an informal social event for the Executive committee, not a business meeting. When you have these fundraisers, make sure he's the one with the keys, checkoff sheet, etc. A lot of public places require someone to show up first, make sure you get the space, and be responsible for making sure the place is locked up afterwards, and everything is cleaned up after the event, so you get your deposit back. Just make sure he's the one responsible for the opening and closing of the site. Also, some groups I used to belong to used to have post-event parties for the people that threw the event, and anyone else who stuck around to help with cleanup. The location would be announced after the cleanup was done, so people had to stick around to help to find out where the party was afterwards. Start referring to him as the "Executive Committee Mascot" instead of the President. As in, he just hangs around but doesn't help out much, lol. Start having unofficial meetings before he gets there, or after he leaves, so he doesn't have any input. Or you could announce the meeting to be held after the cleanup is done. We used to make up a timetable for our events. So everybody knew what had to be done, and so we would have enough time to do it in. That was for setting up the event, during the event, and cleaning up afterwards. Always allow a little extra leeway to get things done. Just do not allow enough leeway for a long boring meeting before the event. Say: "Gee, I would love to stick around for all of this, but I have to start doing - whatever."Try to find out what times he can't attend meetings, and talk to the other members about scheduling your meetings during those times, as it's the only time several of them can make it to the meetings. Set up impromptu meetings at somebody's house, have a short meeting, then watch TV and send out for pizza. Or bring your own munchies. Just "forget" to invite him, as "it's more of a social gathering than a business meeting." Even if he starts showing up, the person whose house it's at can keep the meeting more informal by turning on the TV, putting in a CD/DVD, or asking what people want on their pizza. If everybody else cooperates, you can force it to be short and more informal.Just a few tips to help you take back your fun!

I think a directory of the different member sites on Xisto, organized by categories would be nice. Something like the Yahoo Directory, but only with Xisto sites on it. Maybe some webrings that just accept Xisto sites would be nice, too. Although the webring hub could be also be hosted at a webring directory site, it wouldn't have to be hosted here. It's easy to see we probably have enough forum members interested in graphics and sigs that there could be a webring just for Xisto hosted sites that have something to do with graphics. possibly business and computers, too. I'm sorry I don't have many ideas, I'm new here.

On Firefox, your logo is very small and sort of buried in among the navigation buttons. The search box is right up against the logo, too. Use a spellchecker on your News section before you post news. The colors are a little dull for my tastes, it's that rusted brown that drags down the rest. But some people may like the color combination. I would replace the brown with something a bit brighter personally.

I have seen software advertised online that is called something like a "Blog Blaster". You buy it and set up a standard message with your links on it, and just push a button, and it posts that same message and links to thousands of blogs all over. This was being hyped as a way to get a bunch of traffic, and lots of links to your site to give the search engines the impression it's popular or important. The ads were bragging about how effective it is to promote your site with. It may not be illegal yet, but it's certainly unethical, and anyone that uses this software should be banned from the search engines permanently.

As several people here have said, if you teach one religion's viewpoint on creation, you have to teach them all. I don't think the Christian Vocal Minority really want that. What they want is for everybody to be taught what they personally believe. But if you're not taught ID in school, can you really go for very long without learning about it elsewhere? You will hear about it from TV, radio, family, friends, Jehovah's Witnesses and others knocking at your door, and of course, churches, if you ever set foot in one. Science believes in evolution, Religious people believe in ID. When was the last time an evolutionist came knocking at your door to discuss science with you? I don't know about you, but in my case, it's never happened. If Evolution is not taught in schools, kids won't get much, if any exposure to it at all. Before airplanes were invented, a lot of religious people said that it was impossible for man to fly. If they had stopped teaching anything that had to do with the possibility of flying, would we have airplanes today? The vast majority of people knew man couldn't fly, and they believed it. And yet they taught science in schools anyway, and eventually a couple of brothers from Dayton, Ohio proved what most people knew and believed was wrong. And let's not forget that at one time everybody believed the Earth was flat, and you could sail off the edge of it, and the moon was made of green cheese, etc. Just because a lot of people know and believe something, doesn't mean it's true. Science has continued to be taught and studied, and has proved a lot of such knowledge and belief to be wrong. But sometimes science has been proven wrong. Let's not forget the "mythical" kraken (giant squid) that scientists said didn't exist. So maybe science will prove evolution someday, and maybe it won't. Actually, I take that back. If science is no longer taught, it will not be able to prove any theory that religious people have is wrong. So we see the convenient thing for religious people who don't completely believe in ID would be for evolution to no longer be taught at all. But if ID is not taught in schools, people will still hear about it from other sources. So let's be fair, and teach science in science classes, and religion in religious classes. And by the way, the two are not necessarily exclusive. Evolution can only explain where people's physical bodies and thinking abilities came from. It can't explain where souls come from, if you believe in souls. Maybe when the Bible says God created man in His own image, it meant spiritually, as in having a conscience and a sense of right and wrong, something animals don't have. Unless you believe that God has a material body and looks just like a normal human being physically?

I think war crimes have a lot to do with whether or not it's something that most other nations would not do. At the time, the US scientists didn't understand nuclear weapons very well, and the US politicians therefore would have understood them even less. The politicians would have heard "blah, blah, blah, more powerful bomb than ever made before, blah, blah, blah, large explosion, blah, blah, blah". And that would have decided them to use it. Everybody that had bombs and planes or rockets were using them throughout the whole war. So the A-bomb was just a bigger bomb to the politicians and military leaders. Any other country that had it back then would have dropped it, too. Because they had no idea what it would really do. they just expected a bigger explosion than other bombs, and nothing more. As for whether or not the US knew about the dangers of radiation, I seriously doubt it. The US personnel that went in to help survivors were exposed to extremely high levels of radiation. Then they were working on artillery that fired nuclear shells during the 1950's. Anybody that fired a nuclear artillery shell would be close enough to die. And during the 1980's I read an article about the American Navy Seabees that did the cleanup on the Bikini Atoll in the 1960's where nukes had been tested. They went out and used bulldozers and piled up the dirt in a big pile and poured a concrete dome over it. The Navy guys doing it did not have any real protection, and were getting cancer years afterwards. And the US was doing above ground nuclear testing at White Sands all those years, in their own country. So I don't think they really knew about gamma rays back then.It was just a bigger bomb to them at the time, that's all. And any other country would have dropped the biggest bomb they could. If Germany had an A-bomb during the London Blitz, they would have nuked London. When the Brits were bombing Nazi-occupied territory, they would have used it in France, Germany, Belgium, etc. The Russians would certainly have used it on the Nazis, and vice versa during the long fighting in Russia. After the US used it on Japan, and found out how bad the damage was at that time, they gave Japan all sorts of favorable trade treaties out of guilt, which are still in effect today. The A-bomb was not dropped right after Pearl Harbor, so why draw a straight line from one to the other? There was a lengthy war fought first with lots of people dying on the Japanese and Allied side before the A-bomb was dropped. You have to realize how the people thought at the time. It was just a bigger bomb, nothing else, and if it helped end the war, so much the better. Too many people had died on both sides, and nobody really wanted the war to drag out another several years.When Dictators round up a bunch of unarmed civilians and have them all killed, that's not an act of war, that's just slaughtering helpless people. That's a war crime. When military leaders use the best weapons they have available during a war, that's normal. The US never used the best weapns they had available after WWII, however. They considered them too horrible to use them again, although they certainly had the chance in several wars after WWII. When Allied troops invaded on D-Day, and pushed up into Germany, any Allied Soldier found to have raped a German woman was court-martialed and killed. But how many German troops raped Allied women in countries they invaded and were never punished for it? How many Japanese troops raped women in occupied countries and were never punished for it? Unfortunately, war brings out the worst in a lot of people, and all war crimes will never be punished. The important thing is that the Allies had laws and military regulations against raping women, and killing babies and unarmed civilians in the countries they were in. And the Nazi and Japanese troops considered it a normal thing to do, and a way of having fun, instead of a crime. Try not to let your dislike of modern US military policies color your thinking about the past. They did what any other country would have done in their situation in those days. They used the best weapon they had to try to end a war costly in lives on both sides. Hindsight is 20/20, meaning you know all the consequences of an action after it's already done. But you can't use that hindsight to change the past. Nor should you use it to condemn what was a normal act for a nation at war in those days.As for your dislike of Bush, he's a lame duck president, he can't run for election next term. So hopefully we'll get a President who does not have such a gift for angering most of the world running things next term. Hopefully the next one will sign the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming, and make a few more changes to US policy. By the way, oil prices in the US have gone up, not down because of the Iraq invasion. Every time anything bad happens in the Middle East, US oil prices go up. It's always been that way since we started importing oil from the Middle East, any halfway educated person in the US knows that. So the war was not to get oil cheaper from the Middle East. We all knew it would be more expensive if we invaded Iraq. But Bush is another topic entirely, so I don't want to get started on that.

Here you go, here's some links. http://www.loch-ness.info/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://maxpages.com/roswell47/Loch_Ness_Monster_Gallery http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://www.scotsman.com/news/new-nessie-pictures-spark-debate-1-1376577 http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://www.crystalinks.com/loch_ness.html I'm not sure if I believe in Nessie or not. I don't think there's ever been enough evidence to prove she exists. But I kind of like the idea of Nessie, and would like to think that she does. I don't know if a plesiosaur could still be around after all this time, let alone a breeding colony of them. But the monstrous kraken (giant and huge squids) were always just a legend until recently, when science has proved they do exist. It's a fact we haven't explored very much of the ocean's depths, and anything could be down there. If there was a way (like an underground river) for deep water creatures to get into Loch ness, then Nessie could exist. Salmon are spawned and hatch in fresh water, and later acquire the ability to live in salt water, then swim downriver to the ocean. They spend the rest of their life in the ocean until they go back up the river the were born in to spawn and die. Maybe Nessies go to Loch Ness to lay eggs deep underwater and then return to the ocean. If there are only a few of them, and they only go there to lay eggs at the bottom of the lake, it would explain why it's so hard to find one with submarines and sonar. A sick Nessie probably wouldn't feel like reproducing, which would explain why no dead ones ever wash up on the lake's shore. I don't think it's impossible for Nessies to exist. Remember, the coelacanth was thought to be extinct for around 70 million years, until a fisherman caught a live one in the Indian Ocean!

Irfanview is the best image viewer out there, and it's free. It opens as soon as you click on the icon or image. You can do various things with it to your images too, like convert colors, do gamma correction, resize, optimize file size, convert formats, etc. You can even use Photoshop filters with it. Since it's simple, it doesn't take long to learn to use. You should get it no matter what other graphics programs you get to use as an image viewer.For just adding some text on top of a picture, I like XNView the best. It's quick and easy to pick whatever font you have and add your name or a caption to an image. Just save the image with Irfanview afterwards to optimize the file size.For a free simple Paint-like program that just does some more basic stuff, ImageForge is good. It doesn't take long to learn how to use either. The same company also makes IconForge, which is nice for making your own icons. Also free and easy to use.When you're ready to really get into some more advanced stuff, the Gimp is the best, it uses Photoshop filters, too. Those are the ones I mostly use.

The nick generator didn't work for me either. The page is very ambitious, a lot of content, which is very good.I suggest you do change your logo when you have the time. Something more exotic looking, that evokes Pakistan would be good. As for the colors, the brown, grey and khaki go together as nice earthy tones, but the purple and white don't go with them. The blue is dull enough to go with the earthy tones, so it works all right. If you replaced all the white with a light tan color, it would look better. And replace the grey with another duller color that goes with the earthy tones. That would give you a professional earthy colored site. Or keep the purples and the white and change the other colors to something more exotic. What colors are on Pakistan's flag? Maybe you could use those, and small icons of the flag for a little graphic detail that would not take long to load.You should definitely have a section on travel, list the cities with airports, and show a map of train lines. Once you get the site up and some visitors, you can obviously make some money off of people looking for tourist information. Airlines, tour groups, travel agencies, and businesses like that are obvious advertisers on your site. For tourists looking at a site to see if they want to go there, it would be good to make your site more exotic looking. A simple graphic or logo would be to take a picture of an exotic earring, or some local coins, then optimize the file size and put your site name with the picture. Just make sure you have a strong contrasting color behind whatever you take a picture of, so you can see the object clearly. And the quotation box looks a bit odd being higher than the News box. Move the quotation box down so the top is even with the news box. You could put your logo picture first in the blue header box, then have the site name in larger letters, to the right of the logo, so it takes up more space to the right of the logo.

I recently downloaded a program that didn't work. I got an error on installing it. So I tried to delete it and I couldn't. I kept getting a message about it being in use by another program. So I checked what was running, and it wasn't listed anywhere in the Task Manager. Next I did a virus scan, and ran Ad Aware, and Spybot S&D without any results. Rebooting didn't help either. I did some searching, and found out this isn't an uncommon problem with XP. It turns out the program using it was probably Windows Explorer. Rather than trying to delete it in Safe Mode, I did a little looking around, and found a neat little free utility. It's called "Move on Boot". It lets you move, delete or rename a program as Windows boots up. You just pick what program to do what to, and it does it the next time you boot up your pc. It worked like a charm. GIbin Soft Utilities

I have a gig of RAM, so I figured I didn't need a program to free up my RAM, either. Thanks for the info. I didn't know it could get tied up until the next reboot. I got the program, and I'll try it. I tried several RAM freeing programs on my old pc with Win 98, and they would keep locking up on me. So I had given up on these kind of programs. I know I have registry Mechanic somewhere, I'll have to get around to installing it and actually using it.

I just downloaded Real Player a couple of days ago and didn't have to pay anything for it. I don't understand why anybody would pay for it when you can just download it for free. I use Firefox, and just clicked on the addons & extensions on my Firefox Google start page, then clicked on the link to Media Plugins. I got the Windows version. Here's the link, if you don't want to bother looking it up yourself: Firefox Media Plugins Page As for spyware, I don't use it for streaming video, so I just told my firewall not to let it contact the internet. I don't let many programs contact the internet on their own. Most programs have to ask me first. It's sort of a backup system in case my scans miss a trojan, and it tries to call home, like ET. LOL.

The two darker arms look like they were built in one piece each. The lighter arms look like they were built as two pieces each. Presumably, the lighter areas are older, and the roof has faded more in the sun. I don't think the building was built as a swastika from the beginning. I think they put on additions until it came out as a swastika. But there's no way they just go out and build additions at random in the US, let alone CA. They have stricter housing codes because of earthquakes. The architect and whoever approved the plans at the company that owns it, and the building inspectors certainly would have looked at the blueprints long enough to realize it's a swastika. It couldn't just happen by accident, without the owner (or whoever approved the plans for him) realizing what shape it was. If anybody knows how to find out what the building is used for, please post it here. I'm curious.

The grid could be done as the background, then just put a transparent t-shirt graphic over it. I have no idea how to do scripts, though. I just know it looks like a mouseover effect to me. Did you click on the "Pixel Wars" link at the bottom of the page? It's a site that rates pixel pages, and has a search engine for them. The original page hasn't been around that long, and there's already 1332 pixel pages, according to that site. (Obviously they need just five more pixel pages, and can stop at that, lol.) And the original page is only the second highest rated among the ones charging US Dollars. That's kind of cold, lol.I think pixel pages are just a fad, and people are not going to get much traffic off of them after a while. I have been to the original site once, when I first read an article about it online, and never went back. I didn't bookmark it either. Have any of you actually bookmarked a pixel page, or went back to look at one more than once? Do you intend to? Did you click more than one link off of any of them? I clicked one off of the original page, and that's all.

I read all the replies in a thread before I post. Partly because I don't like to post if somebody else has already said the same thing. And I don't bother replying to threads that seem pretty trivial like asking your favorite color or something like that, unless it's something I'm really interested in. Since I read the whole thread, I only click on posts that seem interesting at the time. Otherwise, I wouldn't have time to sleep, or do anything else, lol. I have gotten interested in other forums in the past, and lost interest for one reason or another, or the forum was closed down. But I like forums, and need something to do with my time, and to distract me now that my Fiance has passed on. I spent over an hour composing my first post in the forum replying to Saint Michael leaving, and then almost didn't click "reply" because it was too personal, and I was kind of embarrassed about it. I read in the other replies that a post didn't count if it was a quote, and I haven't used this particular forum software before. I didn't want it to count, even if it was my first post here. So I just did one big quote of his post, and cut it up into sections and replied in that same quote box to each section. I have seen that done at various other forums as a standard thing. Unfortunately, at a first glance, I guess it looked like I just did a quote of him since my responses were all in the same quote box, instead of at the end. If you just skipped reading the quote box and looked after that for a separate area of words, there wasn't one. But I was afraid if my answer wasn't in the quote box, it would count as a post, and I didn't want it to count. So a Mod deleted it, thinking it was just a quote of him with no reply anywhere in it, since it wasn't at the end, and pointed out it didn't count since it was a quote anyway. So that kind of hurt my feelings since it took me so long to write my reply, and upset me so much to talk about that stuff. But it was just a misunderstanding, so no big deal. I'm kind of glad it got deleted anyway, since it was so intensely personal. I guess he/she kind of did me a favor by deleting it. I just hope they don't think I'm a forum spammer. I have been a Mod or Admin at several forums over the years, and hate forum spammers myself, lol.I would rather write a good reply to a few posts than a few words in reply to a lot of posts. I'm sort of looking for a forum to hang out at anyway. I need a feeling of community since I'm alone now. I want a free hosting account, and will get around to asking for one. But I need a community feeling just as much right now, so I'll be a regular here anyway. I see no need to go find another forum to hang out at and then come here, too. So far, this one seems to have a pretty good sense of community, and it has topics that interest me. I'm a member of a few other forums, but mostly two main ones. One is basically more business than community, and I drop by about once a week. The other one is from my Fiance's Gaming Guild, and he talked me into joining the Guild, since I game a little bit online. But everybody there misses him, and I feel a bit uncomfortable going there. I just haven't connected with anybody there very much yet, since the Guild is so big and has so many members. Most of them don't even know each other. So it just isn't what I'm really looking for. I think mostly I just go there because he can't anymore, and would want me too.

My Fiance and I wanted a pc for a long time, but we just couldn't afford one. Then some idiot hit us in an auto accident and we bought a pc with the settlement. We went to a place where they built it for us, and we got the best we could at the time and made sure it was upgradable. We bought new parts later on to upgrade it and had them sitting around, then a friend gave us an old 14" monitor and we bought a used case and a cheap sound card and a halfway decent motherboard. Then my Fiance put all the spare parts together and built a second pc with it. He played a lot of online games, so he had the better one. Whenever he upgraded it, he passed the old parts down to my pc, so it got better over time. He died last November, so I use his now since it's much better than mine. Except I have a 120 G hard drive and a 30 G hard drive and he has a 80G and a 30 G hard drive in this one. So eventually I'm going to read up on switching hard drives and take the 30 G out of this one and put my 120G in here. I'll pass the other one on to his sister. She's still using a Pentium I in hers, and some other really primitive stuff. Her husband had an even older slower one that couldn't handle anything over Windows 95, and he just got a newer one that has a PII or the equivalent in it.My fiance built a nice pc for his mother before he died, and she only uses it to play solitaire on. She just hasn't gotten around to getting on the internet yet. She intends to, however. His sister and her husband use AOL, and wait forever for it to load, so they're thinking about getting a cable connection. They both use pcs at their work, so they know how the internet is supposed to load if you don't have AOL. LOL.

I just read something about the Razr the other day. It said that Motorola stock was slipping and the company was in trouble until they came out with the Razr. It seems American companies just can't compete with the prices of foreign sweat shops and child labor. So instead of trying to make a good phone as cheap as the foreign imports, they went with the coolest design they could, and targeted an up-scale market. Now they are talking to third world countries offering to put in the basic mobile phone technology for the country just to open up new markets for themselves. They even sell Razrs in India where the vast majority of the populaton can't ever afford them. But they are getting a reputation for being the coolest mobile phone company there, and people are buying their other cheaper phones, so they don't mind. They are also supposed to be working on cheaper phones that look like the Razr to sell in poorer countries, too. Using plastic cases that look like metal, for instance. They are also working on developing new designs, since any time an American company comes up with something that sells good in the US, foreign companies make imitations of the American product. So they expect cheap foreign knockoffs of the Razr soon.

I hate the kind of ads that pretend to be scanning my pc, then tell me I do have spyware or a virus on my pc. The first time I saw one of those pretending to be scanning, I was worried. Then it said I had Win 2K and was using IE, when I had Win 98 and was using Opera. The ad just read what I told Opera to say if anyone asked. That's when I realized it wasn't scanning my pc, and got over being mad at my firewall, lol. I've also gotten spams in my email claiming to be from some technical support sounding place that said I had spyware or a virus on my pc in the subject line. Of course, I just deleted them without reading, so I don't know what they were trying to sell. I read that there are a lot of places that give you software that claims to check your pc for spyware and remove it that are actually installing it instead. So watch out for bugus spyware removal programs. I use Ad Aware and Spybot S&D myself.

I only play one online game currently, Neverwinter Nights. It's a RPG game. It's based off of D&D, more or less. People have made all kinds of variants and servers for it. D&D: Forgotten Realms, Middle Earth, even Harry Potter. It's got servers all over the world, and has servers in all kinds of different languages. Some servers are more hack 'n slash, some are very serious RP, some are a bit of both, so it's got something for everybody. It's been out for quite a while, so it's quite cheap to buy. No fee for online gaming. NWN 2 is supposed to come out "soon" (you know how gaming companies are when they say "soon").I also used to play Diablo 1 online. I have it for my PSX, too. I never got a console after PSX, I got a computer instead, lol.

How about you make up sort of an imaginary game to go along with forum status? Many games have stat pages, especially the FPS games like America's Army. Some games also give Military ranks to frequent good players. So have some titles or ranks based on the number of reviews they have done, but also allow teams or clans to "share" their rank points for team ranking purposes. So you can have a page with the highest ranked reviewers, and the highest ranked reviewing clans. Nothing like inter-clan competition to get them coming back and being active. You could also award Medals, Ribbons, Citations, Commendations, etc. for individuals and teams. Set up a forum area where clans from different games can post recruitment requirements, so they can look for new members. You could even have a page for each clan linked to that thread that showed their awards and achievements. Make them do the page themselves, but check it for accuracy before putting it up. They could also list their clan servers addys on the page. Also post some member news on your front page somewhere. Like if somebody sets up a new server or is looking for people for a LAN somewhere. Or if a clan does well in competition and wants to brag a little. Offer to host a new mod or map or whatever for a game that one of your members has done for others to download. Just a few ideas off the top of my head. You definitely need a good forum with good mods though. If your site has a bunch of flame wars, everybody will leave, so you need mature, diplomatic people to mod at your forum.

People started putting up link exchange pages where they just swapped links to any sites, just to have a bunch of links to get higher SE rankings. The bot at Google (and maybe others by now) has been programmed to handle that. If it finds a page with a bunch of links, it checks to see if the links actually have anything to do with the site's topic. If the links are not relevant to the site listing them, it doesn't count them. It may actually take away points for trying to artificially inflate your ranking. It also compares your pages to other ones with a lot of links on them it found on the web. If they have basically the same links on them, it can tell it's a link exchnge. So it won't count. The only good links for Google anyway, are links to sites with content related to yours. Those count very highly. So be careful using link exchanges, it may hurt more than it helps. This is the best site I have ever found for SEO related stuff. The forums are great. Search Engine Watch This is the next best I have found: Search Engine Guide A blog, with good articles, news and a free resource section. Here are some others: Pandia Good articles and free resources. SEO Chat They have free tools, too. SEO Today A newsletter, but has archives of their past articles. Black Hat SEO A site about the things to not do for good rankings. SEO Tools Free tools, tips, and articles. SE Roundtable Sort of a summary of top forum threads from several SEO forums. ALso has its own forum and article archives. 151 SEO Tools

Um, I'm very new here, and this brings up a question for me. Does the length of a post have anything to do with getting credits? I read in the rules that you were supposed to make a 'real' post, and not just a smiley or a few words. I tend to be very chatty on forums, and make pretty long posts quite a bit. I don't want them to be considered 'spam' just because I'm chatty. I'm extremely talkative in person, but I have Social Anxiety Disorder, which makes it very hard for me to associate with people in person, so I tend to be talkative online, even though I am a slow typist, and only use 3-4 fingers when typing, lol. Are long posts considered 'spamming'?