We need “operation 9” to suppress the bookies

Written By: - Date published: 12:37 pm, March 30th, 2012 - 22 comments
Categories: humour, Judith Collins, police, Satire - Tags: , ,

Evidently the people at iPredict don’t like being called “bookies” or being described as “opening a contract” on someone. We are now being targeted by this shadowy organisation.

Judith Collins to sue The Standard

The contract will be closed immediately at $1 if Ms Collins announces, before 1 May 2012, that she plans to take legal action against anyone associated with the blog hosted at www.thestandard.org.nz. It does not matter whether or not she subsequently pursues this legal action.

For the contract to close at $1, Ms Collins must name The Standard and/or someone publicly known to be associated with it, not simply refer to it in more generic terms such as “a blog”. In referring to a person, the use of a blog pseudonym (eg, “Eddie”) will be sufficient.

An announcement includes a media statement from Ms Collins published at www.beehive.co.nz and/or www.national.org.nz ; or a statement made by her on live radio or TV; or a statement from her reported on both www.nzherald.co.nz and www.stuff.co.nz

Will the police not launch “operation 9” to find the bookies issuing these “contracts”? I view taking out contracts like this as tantamount to talking up threatening behaviour. Sure they’re not talking about tossing buses with catapults. However they are giving an incentive for gamblers to speculate on damaging this site. Besides which, I too would like to see millions of dollars wasted in massive raids and legal bills for minimal results. It is good for the journalists to have a long running story of rack and ruin running. Mind you, Judith Collins appears to be trying to do that to the National party at present.

Needless to say the contract is currently falling like a stone on the 345 trades at the time of writing.

But seriously, I guess someone over there saw the humour of my post “You know you’re in trouble when: The bookies open a contract on you” yesterday.

Given the silliness that the rorting (why should I pay taxes to help her clean her frigging reputation?) Judith Collins is using with her attempted gagging defamation suits – this might be a reasonable bet. Of course if the question was that she should actually win or get a settlement, then the probabilities would be very very low..

But the silliness of Collins is evidently contagious

hattip: Hooten (who else?)

22 comments on “We need “operation 9” to suppress the bookies ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. Lanthanide 1
    30 March 2012 at 12:40 pm

    I got in fast and made some $$ off this already. Thanks Hooten.

  2. RichWhite&Fey 2
    30 March 2012 at 12:46 pm

    Yup, I was in there too ..

  3. captain hook 3
    30 March 2012 at 12:48 pm

    they seem to have a method of rorting the daily MSN poll when it suits them too.
    they worse than bookies.
    they bent bookies.

  4. Jester 4
    30 March 2012 at 12:49 pm

    Look at it this way LP. With free advertising like that you may increase market share and move from 3rd most read blog to 2nd place behind Whaleoil.

    Silver lining and all that.

    [lprent: Yeah I have been meaning to find time to find out the technique he has been using to boost his page views and visitor stats. Based on his comments and lack of quality in his posts I simply don’t think it is “natural”.

    He reported a 18 minute average visit time from analytic’s a few months ago which is ummm unusual. Ours is just over 6 minutes, and the last time kiwiblog reported one it was just over 5 minutes. 18 minutes would require a substantial portion of his readers to be actively reading pages for hours on end. He doesn’t have the comments for that to happen.

    You notice that despite falling numbers of comments and posts that Kiwiblog started exhibiting the same interesting behaviour last month? The other mover last month was throng which coincidentally I have heard does Whale’s advertising. I have also heard that kiwiblog is heading there as well.

    Unfortunately I don’t have that much time at the current phase of the project at work to look at these side issues.

    Update: In our case the visit time variability is directly related to the number of words in comments and posts for a day. It has been rising as the number of comments on site has increased so dramatically. ]

    • Jackal 4.1
      30 March 2012 at 1:53 pm

      I’m no expert but it’s my guess that Slater has an off site comp somewhere with a continuous refresh code and reassigning IP. That would give you increased unique visitors and the longer visit time because they have likely not found code to automatically close pages. You would reboot the system and have it auto load the browser that would automatically load any amount of pages the system is capable of. Seems a bit of a waste of time and money to me, but that is one way to falsely increase hits.

      • lprent 4.1.1
        30 March 2012 at 2:13 pm

        That would get discounted by statcounter and the like because it would look like a bot. It has to come from many IP’s.

        The most likely reason in my opinion is that there is some javascript in the pages that simply re-loads the page periodically to update part of the page. Then if people leave the page open in a tab of their browser they will get repeated page views. Depending on the frequency of the reloads compared to how the counter site calculates visits (ie the period between page loads) it can also increase the number of visits and/or increase the time of the visits. This is what appears to be happening on these sites – they are showing significantly increased page views, smaller increases in ‘visits’, and in one case a longer visit time.

        The same thing happens when you get pages that have reloading frames and iframes, and many screen objects using ajax if they have the counter code in them.

        In this case I suspect it something to do with advertising bearing in mind the sites it is covering and their advertising commonality.

        The number of unique visitors would remain the same (it isn’t the same as unique visits) because the IP won’t move.

        There are other mechanisms. For instance this happened to us early last year when I put the new and improved async facebook code on our site. Whenever anyone opened a post here the facebook code injected from facebook would cause an extra page view to pick up the excerpt and image to display on the recommend button – even if you hadn’t pressed it.

        So we had higher page views for the same number of visitors. That carried on for 6 weeks until facebook finally fixed the bloody problem and our CPU’d slowed.

      • ropata 4.1.2
        30 March 2012 at 10:14 pm

        There are a plethora of tactics available to the unscrupulous,
        https://www.google.com/search?&q=fake+traffic+bot

    • King Kong 4.2
      30 March 2012 at 2:00 pm

      Don’t like losing? Call the winners cheats.

      A tactic that has made its perpetrators look petty and expose their feelings of deep humiliation for centuries.

      • Jackal 4.2.1
        30 March 2012 at 2:07 pm

        You can’t label Slater a winner by any stretch of the imagination King Kong.

      • lprent 4.2.2
        30 March 2012 at 2:21 pm

        I don’t think it is a cheat. That would imply that it is deliberate which I suspect would exceed the available skill levels.

        I suspect that it is simple sloppiness in how some advertising code is operating. The sites that it is on and what I know is happening to their advertising would tend to lend itself to that conclusion.

        But there will be a easy test. If I am right and kiwiblog and throng have just started using the same bits of code last month, then the Open Parachute figures will show marked increases in those sites for this month as the code has been running all month. If the code was fixed in the last month, the Whaleoil site will show a marked drop.

        That should be easy enough to test. Perhaps we should ask ipredict to open a contract?

        Our site statcounter shows that we are likely to be just over 400k page views for the month and probably close to 170k visits. Last month was 321k and 138k. That gives a pretty good indication of the expected rises for a site coming out of the post-xmas slowdown.

    • McFlock 4.3
      30 March 2012 at 2:12 pm

      Be fair, lprent. WO readers might  be taking very long to read the posts because they need to refer to dictionaries for difficult words like “fair”, “reasonable”, “empathy” and “the”.

    • Reality Bytes 4.4
      30 March 2012 at 8:23 pm

      Maybe the fuzz and Nat PR agents are taking a little bit more interest than usual in Mr Slaters site. The long page view times would explain that. With the ACC shitstorm and his TV appearances, and the fact Nats would be in damage control mode, it’s understandable there would be more activity than usual I guess.

      I can tell you this much for certain, I’m not one of those stats.

    • felix 4.5
      30 March 2012 at 8:37 pm

      The obvious explanation for the page view times is that his audience aren’t very good at reading.

  5. Jim Nald 5
    30 March 2012 at 12:54 pm

    Spoke with and encouraged my work mate who is choosing in favour of giving money directly to The Standard by walking into a bank and making a cash donation during lunchtime today.

    I had pointed out info on this webpage:
    http://thestandard.org.nz/contact-us/donate/

  6. infused 6
    30 March 2012 at 1:40 pm

    Think you need a holiday mate.

    • lprent 6.1
      30 March 2012 at 1:51 pm

      But Judith Collins is rapidly descending a point of outright mirth in my mind. The crusher who has managed to crush one solitary stripped vehicle. Fighting for her reputation on a case that she is very unlikely to win – using my taxes to pay for it!

      National running a circular knife in the back contest as they participate in a mutual euthanasia society.

      Cameron running around screaming like a stuck pig because people are calling him on the crap that he writes and asking him who ‘he’ writes it for (and bitching about ‘anonymous’ writers when he appears to have several personalities).

      And now a gamblers paradise for insiders taking bets on the madness spreading here.

      It is all rather funny…

      And I do need a holiday. I have more than 6 weeks of accumulated unused holidays at work. In a couple of weeks the project will be off for testing and I will start taking some of those weeks off.

      • Hami Shearlie 6.1.1
        30 March 2012 at 2:50 pm

        We musn’t forget that Auntie Judy crushed Nick Smith to “smith-ereens” – even if she didn’t mean to !

  7. George D 7
    30 March 2012 at 2:42 pm

    It’s always a good idea to be careful with public statements about powerful figures, keeping to the proven and framing the unproven as mere speculation.

    Nevertheless, iPredict should watch that they aren’t perceived to be on the wrong side of the law…

    • lprent 8.1
      30 March 2012 at 3:02 pm

      Yeah, but this gambling association is a bit dangerous, don’t you think?

      I think that this shadowy risk taking conspiracy needs to be drawn to the attention of those bonehead police in Otahuhu who initiated operation 8 after a year of misinterpreting illegally captured information.

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