Anthology of Ideas » spammers

Looking for locksmith; will pay 550 thousand dollars.

aaron — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:47:46 +0000

I was going to help this poor man, but “offortunitely,” I don’t have a hammer. Maybe you can?

Dear Sir,

This is john kamara from Liberia West Africa. I am the only son of my father. My late father was the managing director of gold and diamond company in my country. And he use his position then to make away for me and my only mother.

Right now. I am in Ghana and I came dawn with a consignment worth 5.5million dollars. At the moment. The consignment is right here with me in my hotel room.Upen my arrival yesterday in Ghana.i tried to open the box but offortunitely. The key get brook on my hands.

This evening i decided to go the internet cafe to search for a God fearing somebody that can assist me to open the box and he will also invest the funds for me .I am ready to give %10 of the total funds to you before any investment. if you can assist me to open the box. Please do get back to me as you read my message Or call me on my private number 1023343590672

I look forward to hear from you soonest.
Thanks and God bless you.
John.

Image credit: Pi production

My WordPress feed is being scraped.

aaron — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:11:04 +0000

Oh yay…yippee…It seems that lately most everything that I post — especially posts about WordPress — are being auto-scraped and ending up displayed in “feed-reader” websites that are just the next generation of splogs. So what am I doing about it to protect my WordPress blog? Simple. I’m adding more links to my past posts.

The sites claim that they aren’t doing anything wrong, and I do have to give their arguments credit, so here is the catch: if they remove the links, then they are modifying my content and aren’t “just another feedreader”, so I can report them, if they leave them in, I can get a little more traffic and “google juice” — although the later is falling in importance and relevancy —, or if they notice this post and remove my site from their list, I get what I really want. It is basically a win-tie-win scenario here.

I apologize if they are irritating to normal readers, but they are always pseudo-relevant links, so I’m not spamming you guys in response to being spammed.

P.S. Not all seem to be scraped, so I’m wondering how many times I need to say WordPress in a post about WordPress to get the WordPress “web reader” to borrow the content from my WordPress site?

Mommy, he hit me. Yah, well you bit me.

aaron — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 01:22:34 +0000

Drama, drama, drama. Sometimes you are amazed at the internet and its ability to bring the word together and coalesce the sum of humanities accomplishments into a single information source. Other times you start to wonder if the internet is filled with pre-pubescent children running around whacking each other over the head with inflatable hammers. Yet again, we have another of the latter. This time the wounded parties are theme designers who sell links to websites, embed them into their themes, and distributed freely across the internet–sometimes, according to Matt, these links are even sold to the same people who spam blogs. Like many of you have heard, these “sponsored” themes are now banned from several central theme distribution sources; thus, minimizing the ability of these themes to spread which, as a result, will keep them from making money for their authors.

Well words have started flying, on one side you have the people losing money and on the other side nearly everyone else. Obviously, those making money are not happy about this cut in their profits, and everyone else–including theme authors who don’t sell links–are rather happy or neutral about it. I’m not going to get into this argument because, as a plugin creator, I’m biased, but really this issue demonstrates the fundamental flaw in the internet: people who want to make money fast are always clashing with those who don’t. Now I’m not talking about legitimate businesses, but the spammers, and spyware types who are constantly doing whatever they can to make a few bucks.

This isn’t the first time these sorts of language wars have started up: back in the days of popups some people weren’t very happy with the advent of popup blockers which cut into their profits, every time Google updates its code the SEO blackhats complain about the loss of benefit from their tricks, and countless other examples of profiters losing a source of their income and complaining.

So what is the point of this post? While I applaud the decision to “blacklist” these themes, when the drama dies down those theme authors are going to be trying to figure out how to make an easy buck again, and I doubt it will be an improvement. So while we won’t have to worry about that specific type of profiteering, we may, over time, find we just traded email spam for comment spam. Why must history always repeat itself?