Want to really waste a lot of time on the web? Want some lessons in frustration or have some money to just throw away? Have a few useless hours to kill and nothing better to do?

Let's play the time wasting game!

Submit to remotely-hosted FFA pages - (a Free For All links page, one of those pages with a list of links which anyone can add to). One of the biggest time wasters on the internet. I have submitted to them all, and to my knowledge I have never received one single hit from any of them (I track my hits so it's easy to verify). You get triple time wasting points if you sign up under your own email account as you will receive many, many thoroughly useless electronic advertisements. These are a hilarious way to pump up the blood pressure and waste a few evenings!

Create some FFA pages - (Here we are specifically referring to those services which specialize in these things, not the ones on your own site). Now this is really a cool time waster. If you want, you can even double your score by paying for one! Okay, you've got your FFA page, now spend hours writing the perfect advertising email, input it into the FFA page and sit back. Now you can waste even more time tracking the hits, organizing the page in different ways, and sending letters to customer support asking why you are not getting any hits!

Use one of those mass submit forms to submit to a bizillion search engines - Wonderful way to spend a few minutes or hours of your day. Find as many of these as you can and submit your site. Now watch your hit counter stay exactly the same! Very subtle way to increase your blood pressure and steal a little time from you each day.

Use the "Canada Method" to submit to Yahoo - Someone has come out with an absolutely hilarious way to wile away some time. Submit your site to Canada.Com in order to get Yahoo to accept your site! Amazingly silly, you'll die laughing as your blood pressure rises from the lack of results.

Sign up for pay-to-surf programs - Wow, you can truly loose months with this excellent time waster. In fact, this is the king of wasters - better than just about anything else on the internet and second only to spamming for sheer fun. You'll get bonus points for spamming newsgroups and sending pointless emails to your family and friends. Triple your points when you scream in agony because your checks are held because you must earn over $25. Extra points awarded for checks lost due to chapter 11 filings.

Join and promote every possible affiliate program - Join hundreds of affiliate programs. Put all of the banners on your web page! Send out spam emails to all of your friends and relatives explaining them ALL. Spend countless hours apologizing to your friends and relatives (those who will still take your phone calls). Have even more fun by spamming a few newsgroups - then explaining to each and every affiliate why you should not have your hard earned $1 confiscated and your accounts canceled.

Open your own virtual store just by filling out one simple form - I've done all of these, and boy are they wonderful ways to spend an evening or two. Fill out the simple form, spend hours customizing your store, then submit it to all of the search engines. Now sit back and watch your money just ... money? Hmmm.

Flame some people - You really want to have some fun, reply negatively to every single email that you receive. Imply in each one something horrible having to do with mother or lack of manners or something (don't directly say anything). Wow! Watch the results. Do this to a few newsgroups also and have some real fun. Better hope none of these people actually know how to hit back ... but then again, an email bomb or denial of service can really waste some time ...

Start a few flame wars - Increase your fun a hundred times! Get other people to flame each other. This is a tough skill to master, so watch a few newsgroups until you see a heated discussion, then drop some comments of your own. When you get really good you can make these mud slinging matches go on for days and tens of thousands of cursing posts! And if anyone ever figures out that it's you behind the heat, then you will have even more fun explaining to your ISP and web host why your account shouldn't be canceled! Even better, you could spend hours deleting a million email messages from your mail box after you are email bombed! Talk about a great way to spend the day.

Join all of the Yahoo webrings you can find - Oh this one is great for losing a few afternoons. Go to webring.org and join every single webring that you an find. Join a hundred of them! Now fret and worry as the ringmasters don't respond! Watch as your hit counters stay exactly at the same place they were! Spend even more time sending emails back and forth to ringmasters asking why you are not being added, why you have been removed and why you aren't getting any traffic! Best of all, the ring fragments clash beautifully with your web pages, requiring you to be very clever (and waste even more time) designing around them! Want to triple your fun? Create some of your own! Now you get to bite your nails as your pages stop working every other day, features change without notification and ring members do not seem to know what to do! Good for those with weak hearts - triple points for hospital time.

Join some MLM programs - Now here's a great way to waste time and money! Find a couple of MLM (multi-level marketing) schemes. Join them, then start recruiting others (who cares about their stupid product, anyway?) to do the work for you. Read and believe every bit of promotional material that comes out of their office. Want to waste even more time? Fly to their events! Call them on the phone! Join their conference calls! And won't you feel good after those months of hard work and hundreds of hours of effort actually pay off and you head to the bank with your $24.75 check!

Reply to Spam - This is a great way to get even more spam to sift through, delete and enjoy. Of course, you will want to reply to all of those also to increase your fun even more.

Ask to be removed from spam - Another great way to waste time, this actually causes your spam to grow exponentially! After asking to be removed from a dozen or so spam emails, you'll just love the thousands of new, fresh offers that you receive! If you really want to choke your email box ask to be removed from all of those also! Loads of fun.

Spam - Man oh man, you really want to waste some time, start to spam everyone. Send mass emails to newsgroups (all 76,000 of them!), and buy one of those CDs with a hundred million "clean" email addresses. Now increase your fun by having to switch hosts and ISPs again and again. Learn to forge your email headers and raise the stakes! Get canceled by all of your pay-to-surf programs again and again, requiring you to build up your referrals time after time! Follow that up with a few visits to court and you've got extra credit bonus points!

I am sure that you get the idea and can think of dozens of more ways to play the game.

Seriously, though, there are many, many productive ways to spend your time on the internet. Even socializing as part of a large discussion list is productive if that's what you want to do. It's very difficult sometimes to sort through the junk and find the jewels ... just try and use some common sense:

• you don't get something for nothing
• spamming is evil and will get you in serious trouble
• Stay ethical
• Don't get greedy
• Anything which is free has a hidden, non-obvious cost

I trust this has been useful.

Copyright © 1999-2001 Richard Lowe Jr. & Claudia Arevalo-Lowe, Internet Tips And Secrets - All rights reserved.