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When one’s publishing business and "day job" collide

Steven TrustrumPress Release Leave a Comment

Internet Troll

Internet Troll is coming for your blog!

It may not come as much of a surprise to most people familiar with the gaming industry, but we here at Misfit Studios have day jobs that pay most of the bills. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe that this lofty gaming empire doesn’t pay for all my gold-plated toothbrushes, but I assure you it’s true!

Anyway, my particular day job is doing content management (writing and editing SEO materials, etc.) for a company that publishes a kit that collects freely available, but somewhat difficult to find, information for small business funding. The problem with this is there is a stigma associated to legitimate companies in this field for several reasons ranging from all the grants and loans scams out there to people thinking that if they buy a kit that is intended to help them find business funding that there should be a government check for thousands of dollars included (and no, I’m not exaggerating–we’ve had people call us a fraud because they did not find a check slipped into the kit.) Basically, this kit is designed to make a small business’ efforts to find government or private funding easier, but we cannot guarantee it will result in funding (because, let’s be frank, there may not be a need in your neighborhood for another convenience store or a dog groomer that only serves three-legged poodles that wear colorful eye patches only Wednesday.)

I bring this up because this leads to a lot of people railing on about the publication being a scam because they bought it butthey didn’t get any money, and then go so far as to say the people who directly attribute their successful funding to the information in our kit are not real–are made up or the like–because how could anyone else possibly succeed where their AMAZING, CAN’T LOSE idea failed? (Which is kind of like a student who fails a course that was over their head to begin with blaming their textbook while claiming no one else passed the course either, even though other students taking the same course and using the same textbook passed just fine.)

But why should this interest you, gentle gamer? Why should my other job intrude upon your serenity of fantasy, dice, and gaming tables? Because part of my job has become going online and addressing these claims that we are a scam or fraud. As part of this role I want to use total transparency to show the company has nothing to hide, so I use my real name (go figure, eh?) In the course of addressing such claims I was initially accused of being a made up persona who really lived in India or some such nonsense, but someone has since bothered to Google me. After finding my information on Linkedin and posting it in one of these complaints forums in some sort of “ah-HA, GOTCHA!” maneuver (go figure–they found and posted the public professional information about me that I chose to make public in the first place on one of the world’s most widely known professional networking sites–after all, it’s not like my last name is exactly common. Oh, those sneaksy, tricksy, Internet hobbits!) And this is where you all come in.

For you see, in their effort to somehow … what? Attack me? Discredit me? Expose me? … by “going public” with my [purposely] already public information, this blog has seen a rapid upswing in spam and insulting post attempts. Not being a total moron (only partial, mind), I’ve always had the comment settings set to first post approval or membership required to prevent the sort of spam you’d expect. Considering some of the things being said in these post attempts and the amount of time someone needs to take to do it that often, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone comes along and feigns being an interested gamer long enough to sneak a post into the system. So, if any incredibly slanderous, asinine, or idiotic posts or pingbacks start showing up at least now you, my Misfit Minions of the Night, will know why.

Anywho, back to rotting our minds with dwarves, dragons, and damsels in distress.

Steven Trustrum has been writing in the RPG industry since the end of the '90s and publishing via Misfit Studios since 2003. Aside from writing and publishing role-playing game content, he ... dabbles ... in content and social media marketing.

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