Everywhere you look on the internet the spammers are crapping and leaving their fetid roach turds.
Last Spring, I did a presentation at the online TCC04 Conference on PhotoBlogging “Publish and Build Communities Around Digital Images”. In that session I described how one can post photos to such sites, and created a special and open photoblog at buzznet so people from the conference, around the world, could post their photos.
But guess who came to play?
Roaches. Roaches. 19 of ’em.
From a comment notification on the Buzznet photoblog , I saw that this gallery had been crapped on 19 times with screen shots of your typical spam offerings- cheap mortgages, bank account frauds, and various chemical offerings.
Is there no end? How many other open spaces on the net need to be crapped on til we all get mad as hell?
Needless to say, I have removed the open access to post here, but I am going to leave all 19 of these lovely spam graphics as another example of the low level of respect and decency that roam the net. And there is my own new cover page as a testimonial to how I feel.
Alan, I suspect that your vociferous objections have made you — and the sites that you are involved in — a *personal* target for one or more spammers.
I don’t see other learning object repositories or photoblogs getting spammed. In fact, I can’t believe that spammers think there’s so much Google PageRank value in the comments on a learning object listing that they need to spam it. And it’s probably not as easy (or profitable!!) to make an automated comment script for a one-off system like MLX as it is to make one for a widely used weblog system like Movable Type.
It might be that you make a lot of noise about spammers, so you gets lots of “attention” from spammers.
Maybe it’s time to take off the bullseye t-shirt?
Maybe.
Perhaps.
Nice theories.
FWIW, most learning objects repositories lack comment tools, hence their spam avoidance.
If this is the case that my writing about this experience is the cause, then what is the lesson here? Shut up and take it? Roll over and die?
maybe.
perhaps.