From the Mind of Trevor Stone

I find these quite rewarding now that I understand the mechanism by which they arrive. Neither of you started it, so it's natural for them to devolve into "no, you msged me first" "no you".

My approach now is once the first message hits me, I start the conversation with something like "hi, you don't know me and i don't know you, but we're both victims of a bot that scrapes our IM identities from LJ or Xanga or something similar, and then mediates a conversatoin between two randomly selected folks."

I often then share a link relevant to the subject http://jwz.livejournal.com/885227.html (you can find this by its subject "was this ever funny" and the user jwz if you forget where the post is).

I've had these conversations go on for a couple hours after we settled what was happening.

In a previous post Trevor had a name for these, but I couldn't find his posting when I needed it.

The other person's names were always of the form + [salmon|trout] but lately i've been getting coho, as well.