Building a thriving internet community can be tough. Converting a community into paying customers is considerably harder. On cockeyed.com, I count on merchandise, click-thru ads and monthly advertising schemes.



Fark.com sells a fortified version of itself (Totalfark) and Something Awful sells access to its comments section.



Dating sites use a different scheme. Many of these sites allow any visitor to post a free profile, but only allow contact information to be exchanged between paying customers. You can look, but you cannot talk. I have to admit, this is an ingenious scheme. New visitors will often devote hours crafting a worthy profile, uploading a complimentary set of photos and composing a personal description which touts an exaggerated appreciation for classical literature.



Once their profile is online, they may start getting some attention, such as "winks" and mail, but may only be able to read that mail once they have paid a monthly membership fee. I empathize with single people in this situation. These sites dangle a carrot so close that it is poking you in the eye. This is like a bank slipping $700 into your checking account, only to charge you a fee when you pull it out of the ATM.





This restriction on contact information invites subversion. Sneaking Contact Information into your Profile If you can somehow sneak your email address into your profile, " I hope SallyBird3433 gets to say "Gee! Male!" in the near future ", " Iceflakequeen vacations near at aye oh well. " or " Atlanta Ballerina, Yeah, who? " You can avoid paying, and you can attract the people who are really scouring your profile. It could save you both money, and even inject a little corporation-busting intrigue into your relationship.



The trick is to hide the email address from the dating site's administrator. He will definitely be filtering all profiles for the word "email", ".com" or the "@" symbol. "Yahoo" is probably forbidden, as well as "pacbell.net".



I'm going to put myself into the email encoding business by simply starting a reference table to dumb two-word codes, like this: Code Email address orange faucet

mink carafe

gravel sweater jerry95859@hotmail.com

trooper10@att.net

dale.evans21@freemail.net

The codes can be ANYTHING. They will only need to be strange enough for people to realize a hidden message is there. Anyone who hangs out online for long enough will know that cockeyed.com is the place to decode these nonsense phrases.



Ideally, even a novice profile-viewer will approach a nonsense phrase such as "zinc typewriter" with a Google search.



"Hmm, she sounds nice, but what the hell is a "zinc typewriter"?



Zinc Typewriter will only have a couple of results, and hopefully, one of them will be the cockeyed.com email decoder page! Your email address will be there for the taking! Victory!