Sigh. The wiki euphoria may be short lived. I’ve just wiped out a pile of link insertions from a pile of weird Chinese web sites from some of our Ocotillo wikis. Sure, I can remove them and ad some IPs to the banned list, but that approach surely will not scale.
Over the weekend, there were a few blog spam roaches that scurried in under the radar for a new blog site still being tinkered. I am rather satisfied with my spam-free months on this blog, and need to extend my method to these other sites.
And then there is a wretched POS web site I will not dignify with a link that D’Arcy shared. For 5o clams, you can spam like the best of the supplement and casino gang:
Xxxxxxx is a Windows-based mass referrer spammer, which means that it will make a connection to a buttload of sites of your choosing with any referrer URL and User-Agent that you specify. This accomplishes several things. Firstly, it generates webmaster traffic from webmasters checking their referral statistics. Secondly, it boosts your link popularity and thereby your Google PR, because a lot of sites have public referral stats with linked entries.
Xxxxxxx is extremely fast in operation because instead of actually downloading entire websites, it sends a customized HTTP header for which it receives a small response. On a modern computer with any kind of broadband, the average number of websites hit per second usually stabilize around 60 to 100.
Xxxxxxx operates on textfiles with URL-lists, and a textfile of 3047 active blog websites which you can use to start getting free traffic and PR right away is included in the Xxxxxxx zip-file!
I will not name nor link to this crap-ware, but look how proud that they are to give you for only $50, the ability shove your URLs onto more than 3000 innocent blogs or as their prestigious PR material suggests “a connection to a buttload of sites”.
And more, web site suckers. Do you really think a webmaster is going to visit your unwanted, uninvined spam ware injected URLs? More likely, they are adding you to a blacklist, and hopefully digging up your domain holder and ISP to request that you be tossed out on your own buttload.
Maybe someone out there will launch a DoS attack on this mother spam roaches ecommerce system. Die, spammer die.
Wow, 60-100 spams per second. Who is going to gain the upper hand, the $50 spammers or us?
Die, spammers, die.
Actually, if Google can get their act together and redo a ranking mechanism that favors relevant sites, not link infested ones, the incentive might go away.
It’s not just Google that needs to change. It’s just the scum of the earth taking advantage of an economic loophole – as long as it’s cheaper to spam than it is to add value, the scum will choose the former.
I’d REALLY like to see Cory Doctorow’s whuffie reputation economy take off… I know of many “important” people that are reputationally bankrupt, and I’d feel pretty confident that most/all of the spammers are in that category as well (there may be a handful who got up with a few bad apples…)