Attempting to create an account for the site? Read this first.

Some 200 attempts are made, each and every day, to sign-up to use this site. Going on past experience, most of them, human and bot, are made in order to advertise (in decreasing frequency):

• Pornography
• Drugs (mainly Viagra)
• Breast or (sometimes and!) penis enlargement
• Counterfeit or perhaps just cheap and shoddy products that look counterfeit (especially watches)
• Other crap

I'm not interested. I know the people who visit here regularly are not much interested either, and even if they were, I'm sure that most of them are smart enough to figure out how to use Google to find the best possible deal for the best possible product (zOMG those are beautiful shoes. OK. I'm back, distraction over.). So, nobody who matters here desires advertising crap and because of that there is no automated sign-up, no computer to fool, and in consequence it is difficult to sign-up, easy to be banned, and generally not worth wasting your time trying to figure out how to publish spam on this site.

Others apparently try to sign-up hoping to promote an agenda which is not mine, often including (in decreasing frequency):

• Israeli/Zionist apologetica
• Teaparty apologetica
• Religious (especially Christer) apologetica
• Global climate change denialism
• Other crap

I'm still not interested. I'm sure there are forums for you Internet trolls and your always-invalid, write-only content. This is not one of them.

Dealing with the flotsam and jetsam of the Internet on a daily basis is exceedingly boring and nobody pays me to do it so I don't. Dealing with the mess such vandals can cause when they figure out how to defeat Captcha and other bot snagging filters by putting a human spammer to work is not just boring, it is really annoying. So I don't do that either. I merely route *ALL* join-up requests to /dev/null. If you are in one of these groups, feel free to look around, see that it hasn't happened for anyone else, deduce that it isn't going to happen for you either, and go and bother somebody else. As Oscar would say, "Go Away."

If you managed to get past Oscar, and don't fit into one of the above identified categories of lamer, you might be family, a friend, or just interested, for whatever weird reasons, in having an account here. In which case, please sign-up for one using the "Create new account" page, and then send me a note telling me why you would like an account using the "Contact" page and including your user name in the message (as otherwise I won't know what you picked), and I will try to enable it for you, perhaps after emailing if I don't know who you are.

It may take some time to receive a response even after doing all this. Sorry. I am a busy person, and, while I usually do see things sent via the contact page, it is sometimes swamped by the diligent (if really stupid) people who would like to "help" me: "optimise your web site"; improve its "ranking in the search engines" or even "improve your income" - proving their idiocy by missing the point that this is merely a hopefully-slightly-less-brainless-than-facebook, strictly not-for-profit, corner of the InterTubez, where the Hermits can keep track of "stuff", stay in touch, amuse and educate family, friends and like-minded people. If you are in one of these categories, or for some unknown reasons would like to join one of them, please feel free to send me a stream of reminders until you receive a response, using the contact form - I really don't mean to ignore you. Anyone else, see Oscar and leave me alone.

Thanks

The Hermits & Co