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News and notes from around the interweb:
- Atlanta couple facing federal charges after earning too many Staples Rewards
- You only need to give your email address and next year and the year after you can earn up to 3% cash back on all your spend
- Speaking of email addresses, a quick signup gets you a year’s membership free (full membership retail $675) to a new members-only hotel site where I’m seeing hundreds of dollars of discounts on rooms.
- Come by the DC frequent traveler meetup October 25
- Why the Prime Minister of Thailand is often referred to as the Mayor of Bangkok
Chao Phraya River, Bangkok - A “non-torment way” to book Indonesian domestic flights online
- Friday’s Qantas flight QF81 from Sydney to Singapore featured an orchestra (“nine musicians from the Australian World Orchestra performed a pop-up concert”).
Your title is misleading they were committing fraud. You make it sound as if it’s a crime to collect a lot of staples points. What makes this more annoying is that you’re the only blog that does not show your post in Feedly just the headline. I don’t mind going to your site to learn something new but it seems like you’re consistently sending hyped up headlines that turn out to be time wasters.
@Matt I don’t know how feedly works since i don’t use it, but I assume that’s a setting — my RSS feed shows summaries, and there’s also an RSS option to show full post content as well, I think this is a user issue or at worst it’s an issue with the RSS reader you’re using?
@Gary, how about you address the REAL issue which is your completely “click bait” headlines over and over again?
Agree, the headline plainly misrepresents the substance of what happened.
Gary, Don’t pretend to be surprised about the RSS feed. That’s just dishonest. You’ve blogged about your change in format: http://viewfromthewing.com/2015/04/24/for-those-interested-in-my-rss-feed/
C’mon, you all should know by now that Gary is the King of deceptive headlines. Gary, I’m just curious. This habit has been pointed out time and time again. Why do you continue to use deceptive headlines when it obviously irks a fair number of readers who otherwise might leave your page happy instead of annoyed?
@Adam and if you read the post you link to, you’ll see that I talk about the excerpt being included with the post. Which is why I’m surprised by the reader saying that Feedly doesn’t provide an excerpt.
@Gary Leff, how long are you going to keep ignoring the elephant in the room?
@Steve = @Lukas from other posts
Confirmation. feedly does not show anything but the following:
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
Continue reading Federal Charges After Earning Too Many Staples Rewards Points and More…
For the folks using an RSS feed – perhaps only feedly – this means not reading the content posted. Or opening another app (if reading on a mobile device) or another tab (less of a hassle). And when using a RSS feed, which is meant to aggregate quickly and save time, this extra step could cause frustration even before the discovery of a tabloid story. You will notice that I can’t even read what ELSE may be on the latest post. (“…and more”) Not every story has this lack of preview, but certainly a large percentage.
I think Gary does a great job. If you do not like Gary’s posts or headlines, then do not read them, and stop wasting your time posting about Gary’s posts, move on. Job well done Gary, let the haters hate, and for the vast majority of us who enjoy your post, we will read them, keep dong a great job.
BTW – I subscribed to over 60 RSS feeds and I cannot think of any other source that has this issue. Just FYI.
@Jim When I saw the post title “earning too many staples rewards”, my first thought was how many is too many. To find out, I had to click on the title. The content clearly is about someone earning these points fraudulently not about how many is too many. I am usually with Gary but how is this not click bait? And how can one ignore a title like this? so for you to say “don’t like it don’t read it” doesn’t wash here.
It’s clickbait, because that’s mostly all Gary does. And by purposefully only showing RSS excerpts (he knows exactly what settings he has), it forces us all here to view the page and find out it’s never what he says.
Yet I still read, because every once in a while the headline actually matches. But you know what? The ads are chump change compared to credit card referrals. Meaning, he’ll get less than a penny from my visit. But the referrals are big bucks.
So, I now make a point of using Lucky’s links for credit card referrals, even if I sometimes get more value out of Gary’s writing. If/when he stops using clickbait, I might start using his referral links again. Balls in his court.
I rarely visit here anymore because of the clickbait. OK, see you all next month when I get bored enough to peek in again.
Wow… I came here looking for comments (independent verification) on Club1hotels site Gary linked to… didn’t expect the firestorm in the comments.
So for the record… yes, Gary’s clickbait is horrible and incredibly annoying to me
But he’s not an idiot… he does it because it works. Analytics numbers don’t lie, and if clickbait brings in a huge number of readers over “non-clickbait” it makes sense for a site owner to exploit it. It sucks… but we just need to learn to live with it. Best we can do is not fall for the trick or not follow sites at all that do it, when it stops working bloggers will stop doing it.
And my feedly feed works fine showing the entire article in feedly. If you want the full version you need to subscribe to a different feed than what’s linked of VFTW’s site. Add this one to your subscription instead:
http://viewfromthewing.com/feed/full
Enjoy! I signed up for club1hotels so we’ll see how it goes.
The Staples thing isn’t even remotely related to travel, nor is it related to points/miles. It’s just buying a script, creating fraudulent accounts and stealing. Not really relevant here.