BBBooBBBies

I find it so amusing that the Better Business Bureau‘s online page title reads “BBBOnLine, Inc. — Promoting Trust and Confidence on the Internet.”

Come on, guys. This is the same site whose “Hyperlinking Policy” supposedly only allows links “from entities that are information sources or public service-oriented, such as news media organizations, government agencies and search engines.” In other words, the BBB don’t want no links from no filthy plebeian sites like this one.

The idiocy and ignorance of this policy overwhelms me. Not only is it simply a bad idea, it’s bad technology, a prohibition that is so easily circumvented that the circumvention itself might be accidental. The BBB’s reasoning (if gelid-brained sphincter-mining could be considered reasoning) is that some poor, confused person might misinterpret information found on the BBB’s site due to the links said person traversed to get there.

To me, this seems a way of passing blame: “No, our content isn’t illegible, illiterate bunk. It’s perfectly understandable, but only so if you start browsing at our main page, then navigate through forty pages of our mind-numbing, will-sucking site. Of course, by then your frontal lobes will have been seared to pulsating goop, and you wouldn’t have the capacity for free thought and/or literate interpretation, but that’s the general idea. It saves on staff writers.”