TonyV

I think they erred on the side of not causing confusion. I have a character named Spin Artist, for example. It would piss me off if someone created a clone named The Spin Artist and paraded around as if they're me. Of course, having said that, I realize that there's nothing stopping someone (other than a petition, so don't get any bright ideas) from creating Spin Artist' and parading around as me, but still, I don't really chalk this up as a big deal.

Come to think of it, there is a practical reason for doing it like they do. As it is, with the titles, you can be something like, "The Stupefying Foomonkey" instead of "Stupefying The Foomonkey," which takes on a little diferent meaning.

Incidentally, as I recall, when people talked to The Tick directly, they called him "Tick." (Citation: The Funeral, at 1:30 in.) I'm almost certain the cartoon was the same. I can't speak for the comic book, but unless proven otherwise, I'm going to assume there are no awkward quotes like, "Well, I'm not really working with him, The Tick, I've just been assigned to escort him..."

Well, I was going to try to help them out and dig deeper into it this morning, nailing down exactly where the malicious script is coming from. The one time I've been able to recreate it, it looked like it was being served up from fastclick.net via doubleclick.net, one of their ad providers. Unfortunately, I'm being stymied by the fact that it seems to only serve up the infected ad intermittently, and that fastclick is causing Firefox on my sandbox machine to crash.

At any rate, there are several reasons we don't run ads on the Paragon Wiki, and the complete lack of trust I have in third-party ad providers is pretty high on the list.

I have to admit, in researching this, I ran across an extremely amusing ad. I won't name who it's for because I don't want to help that company, but it shows a kneeling scantily-clad woman, her hands bound in chains to a tree above her head as she struggles to get free. Creepiness factor aside, there are two quotes alongside the animated image: "'Awesomely deep character skills...' --SomethingAwful Forums," and "'Best Online RPG I have played...' --[censored name], [censored company] Player"

So the two best testimonials they could dig up come from a SomethingAwful forum poster and one of its own players? Wow, yeah. That's just screaming to make me want to try it.

Hi all,

So someone pointed me to Wikia's City of Heroes wiki tonight to see something totally unrelated to this post (a new and even more annoying form of advertising, in case you're curious), but when I visited, I discovered something more diabolical. As the creator and administrator of the "competitor" Paragon Wiki, I know that this post may be interpreted as biased and especially self-interested, but it's important enough that I felt like I had to say something here.

I discovered tonight that the Wikia City of Heroes wiki (please note: not the Paragon Wiki!) has been infected with malware. I discovered it when Google Chrome gave me a huge alert box saying that it was trying to load content from a known malware site. After digging around for a while on a sandboxed virtual machine, I discovered a hidden iframe that is being attached to the top ad banner that is, indeed, attempting to load malicious code.

Google Chrome will catch it and warn you. If you are visiting the site using Firefox or Internet Explorer, however, you will receive no warning, and the malicious code will attempt to execute. I haven't dug into it to the point of finding out what it's trying to do, but rest assured, whatever it is can't be good.

Google actually provided a link to a Google analysis of the malware server, and it showed that it exists across many Wikia wikis. I don't think it's in their core code, because I checked a few other wikis and didn't see it across all of their wikis. If I had to guess, I think it's either being injected through one of their third-party advertisers (the malicious script is attached to an ad banner) or by a jerk hacker who has figured out some exploit to infect multiple Wikia sites.

At any rate, I am going to try to alert the contacts that I had from when the Paragon Wiki was at Wikia and let them know that their City of Heroes site is infected. I don't have any love for Wikia, but I have way less love for malware pushers and as a site admin myself, I resent anyone's site being attacked like that.

In the meantime, I highly urge you not to visit the Wikia City of Heroes site. Again, if you have Firefox or Internet Explorer, you will not receive any warning about the malware. (If you have Firefox's NoScript extension installed, though, it won't load the script and you should be safe.) If you use Chrome, you'll get a big red warning about it. Please read and heed.

And yes, this is probably shameless plug, but I'd also like to take a second to remind everyone that the valid addresses of the Paragon Wiki are wiki.cohtitan.com and paragonwiki.com. They both lead to the exact same site and both names are considered official and completely interchangeable. The Paragon Wiki is not affiliated with Wikia, and any site with wikia.com in its domain name is not affiliated with the Paragon Wiki. The Paragon Wiki also has no advertisements and is consistently kept way more up-to-date than Wikia's site. If you are linking an article to a City of Heroes wiki, please make sure you are using the right address!

If they started selling influence, I'd drop a couple of grand on it just so that I could lord it over you all. "Ha ha, I'm rich, and you all are poor as dirt!" Do we really want that to happen? I'm telling you, I would be completely insufferable about it. Seriously. I'd post YouTube videos of me deleting purple IOs. Just because I can. "I'm sorry, did one of you want that?"

On the other hand, I admit, it would be fun to say to some people, "You farmed how long for that!? Man, it was just half an hour at my day job for me."

Oh, by the way, yes, I've seen the local channel spammers out and about. Methinks that it will only get worse.

Okay, come clean now...

I see SELBORN coming down diagonally from the top right corner. Did you misspell (Dr. Trevor) Seaborn? I almost posted a picture with that one, on the offhand chance that you did. I thought that was awful convenient to be just one letter off like that, and like others, I thought that Ge jus has way too much chance to be random.

I'm at work and can't work on this right now. But if I program a word search generator for you that guarantees no duplicate names, would that be worth a costume code to ya?

I used to take classes at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta, and I'd have to walk back and forth between the classroom buildings and work. On the way, there is a courthouse with a historical plaque on the side of it that looks exactly like a history plaque in-game.

I'm no good at designing real-life costumes, but I really did at some point want to get a picture of me dressed up as a hero standing beside it and reading it for a costume contest one year, strange looks from passers-by be damned.

For probably a month after I started playing, I was curious why I had a bunch of keys bound by default to talk to someone specifically named Starget. I swear to god I thought it must be some kind of system account or something.

Ah, those were the days!

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If you're in a public space, even a virtual one, you're going to have people sometimes doing things that they think are helpful that you might find personally irritating.

It's not out of malice, most people like it, so suck it up and live with it.

Belle made up a bunch of these and tells them periodically on teams to break monotony and lighten up the mood. (No pun intended, though it seems oddly appropriate.) Let's see if I can remember some from memory...

Q. How many Vahzilok does it take to change a light bulb?
A. With suitable "treatment," the old one never has to die.

Q. How many Banished Pantheon does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Two; one to resurrect the one that burned out and one to place it back in the socket.

Q. How many Circle of Thorns does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Just one, but then it takes ten more standing around it and chanting to make it glow. (That's my personal favorite.)

Q. How many Freakshow does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Two, one to screw it in and another to be the socket.

Q. How many villains does it take to change a light bulb?
A. A team of eight: One to kidnap the light bulb installation engineer, one to hold his family hostage as a threat, one to intimidate the populace into "not seeing anything," one to frame it on an Arachnos faction, three to fight off the heroes that come to rescue him, and one to watch guard over him as he completes the task. (I can't actually remember Belle's break down, but it was something like that.)

Q. How many Nemesis soldiers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. Over four hundred, and the plot has been in the works for decades now.

Q. How many Malta Operatives does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Change it!? But I just drained it!

(Disclaimer: This one is mine, not Belle's...)
Q. How many Ouroboros Menders does it take to change a light bulb?
A. You know, funny thing, just when I think it's about to go out, someone has always shown up and changed it. Afterwards, I find several weird notes to me laying around. And for some reason, I have an ominous sense of foreboding about this trend.

Q. How many Taxibots does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Five. Four to teleport it to each of the exploration badges in the zone, plus one to teleport it safely into its socket. (I think that's her favorite.)

I suggest making up some kind of graphics flyer and sending a PM to Niviene and/or Avatea. They'll post the flyer and get some added attention to the contest, which is always good publicity.

First of all, I apologize. I don't know for what, but hey, I've never been beneath a good apology.

Second of all, I can't help but observe that this method of recruiting, getting into surreal arguments and threatening people, is certainly a bold new strategy in getting people to join your super group. I'll be very interested in seeing how it works out.

Dammit, I got passed over for promotion again!!? Where's my fancy new title? I WANT A STRIKE TEAM TOO!