This is a follow on from this event a little while back: ‘Reckless’: Man pretending to be injured on motorway overbridge arrested.
Back in April, I spent some time looking into a fledgling charity called the Suicide Reduction Trust (SRT). It had caught my eye after a reader tip-off about a TradeMe listing they believed might be a scam. The listing advertised a raffle with the prize too good to be true: a free house. And not just any house, a $2m Auckland mansion, along with cash for furniture and a brand new Tesla to boot. The raffle was advertised as raising funds for the SRT, which had launched shortly before the win-a-house promotion. While TradeMe pulled the listing, telling The Bulletin that it went against its rules, the raffle was legitimate, as Stuff’s Tony Wall reported at the time. But who was behind it and why?
A couple of weeks ago, an email arrived in The Spinoff inboxes with a provocative and, to be frank, shocking subject line: “Auckland lawyer hangs himself on Auckland motorway overpass.” It was from Jaques, criticising the media for failing to cover his new charity. The body of the email clarified this was simply an attention-grabbing stunt. “I’m going to do you a favour and give you the newsworthy clickbait you so badly desire and this morning I’m going to hang myself from an Auckland motorway overpass and you’ll have the story you really want,” he wrote. A few hours later, reports started to emerge of a man dangling from an overbridge, attached to a harness, causing delays to shocked rush hour commuters after two lanes were closed by emergency service. Newshub reported that Jaques was throwing leaflets at the speeding traffic below. He was later charged in relation to offensive behaviour and endangering transport.
Jaques acknowledged it could have “a profound impact on the Trust’s reputation and way of operating” and said “he may have in fact caused more harm than good”.
I don’t use LinkedIn at all, but that profile confirmed my suspicions about it.
Good choice. I have an account, and I get spam emails to my work email address constantly (its not listed, but with name + employer you can guess it).
Plus the messages from recruiters.
I keep it because I still catch up with people I used to work with, and often I’m contacted via LinkedIn.
I have always had accounts everywhere to redirect people who want to contact me to my website. Even when I was working fulltime, my linkedin profile has always just said something like I work as Lastname at Lastname.
Amuses the hell out of me to get messages from LinkedIn telling me that recruiters are desperately looking for people with my particular skills and experience. To be fair I guess I have been a Lastname for ages now… 😄
I’m not fancy enough to have my own website 😆. At the same time, I don’t really want strangers contacting me. People I used to work with who want to catch up, yes please. People who want to sell me a job, no thanks.
I’m not fancy either, it’s just obscure creative stuff not employment related, so no horrible requests just people looking for things I made or old friends.
Basically I’m just vain. A couple of decades ago (when the internet was much smaller) someone put up an incredibly unflattering photo of me online, so since I enjoyed making websites, I made a website just to win SEO with a flattering photo instead!
Funny! How did you annoy someone enough that they put an unflattering photo of you online?
I’ve had my fair share of websites in the past. More along the lines of Geocities or Myspace, but I’ve done vanilla HTML/PHP/MySQL stuff, also decades ago. At a time when marquees were the peak of style. Once people wanted websites to look good I bowed out and stuck to hosting instances of sites that other people made.
That would have been funny but they weren’t annoyed with me, it was part of one of those things where people put up a bunch of photos of people attending an event and caption them with their names. I just thought I looked super creepy, and not what you want to be the top result.
Omg php, I never got into that but php bb sites were all the rage. I used to make websites in Dreamweaver. Back when you needed a whole adobe suite to make one website because people wanted animated buttons and flash ha ha. It’s so different now we have CMSes.
Oh I never had the adobe suite, my websites were terrible haha.
I definitely did my time on some php bb sites. Php was all the rage, Facebook was written in PHP (and maybe still is? They developed some way of precompiling it for speed and gave it a new name).
Hmm, apparently it still is. Called Hack. There’s a list of programming languages for popular sites here. Still a fair bit of PHP hanging around. Even more surprising, Yahoo is still high on the list!
I actually got a part time job as a webmaster when I was a student. On my first day in the job I realised the site consisted of over 1,000 pages sitting right there in the top level directory with no folder structure and no cms, all just manual links.😁😥😫
That’s an interesting list! Yahoo!
Kbin/Mbin is written in php! Kbin itself seems to have fallen by the wayside though.