Almost on cue to the Squidoo spamming response comes another piece of porn/ringtone-spam... this one leverages not just Squidoo but also Hubpages.
Hubpages, however, has *already* taken down the offending porn/spam pages. Not sure if they got a complaint or something, but obviously they are doing a better job minding the store than Squidoo.
Why wouldn't these people just put one quality control person on the incoming "new pages" and take down the spam? (answer: less page views/revenue). If Wikipedia with no f/t staff can keep spam off their pages why can't venture-capital back companies? You could hire a service in India for nothing to just review pages.
The offending email after the jump...
[ NOT SAFE FOR WORK EMAIL AFTER THE JUMP]Author : gligiourn (IP: 112.1.0.0 , 112.1.0.0)
E-mail : orabbenurge@simferopol.krim.ws
URL : http://www.squidoo.com/Get-ringtones
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=112.1.0.0
Comment:
Busty blonde student gets @#$%$ @#$%@#$%#
<a href="http://hubpages.com/hub/big-titu" rel="nofollow">Young girls with @#$%@#$%$</a>
Movies of sweet twink seduced @#$%@#$%#$%@#$
<a href="http://hubpages.com/hub/gay-an" rel="nofollow">Free @#$%#@$ Sex Video</a>
Movies of gay guys @#$%#$@%#$%#$%#@$%#@$%#@
<a href="http://www.squidoo.com/pid/" rel="nofollow">Gay @#$%@#$%@#$%</a>
Who want to have cool ringtones? Good realy site...
<a href="http://www.squidoo.com/Get-ringtones" rel="nofollow"> Ringtones by Avril Lavigne</a>
<a href="http://www.squidoo.com/free-mobile-ringtone/" rel="nofollow">download free mobile ringtone</a>
More on Squidoo spam (and Hubpages doing a good job?)
Reader Comments
(Page 1 of 1)2. Jason, you're always in for a fight because it creates publicity.
Spam is a universal problem.
So why pick on Seth?
Because it's easy and you position yourself against Squidoo, you utilize the existing brand awareness.
It kind of reminds me of what you did with Netscape.
Now you want traffic to pick up again for Mahalo.
Mahalo's not great (not yet anyway) so I don't think the public will create the buzz.
I want Mahalo to succeed.
But I want someone else to start a fight with you where you're the one who has a specific problem.
I want someone else to take advantage of the Calacanis brand.
Posted at 4:18AM on Jul 8th 2007 by ds
3. When I do a search on Mahalo I need to do another search because I need to read the entire page, top to bottom, left to right in order to find what I'm looking for.
It's like wikipedia but at least on wikipedia I learn something.
On Mahalo it's links, links, links.
How boring is that?
It's annoying!
Focus on your own problems instead of trying to take advantage of someone else's spam problem. It's a cheap shot.
You can do better than that.
Posted at 7:39AM on Jul 8th 2007 by ds
4. Spam is a hugely important problem. HubPages has taken lots of preventative measures to slow it down and built lots of technology to combat it. HubScore was designed to be an auto-editor which makes decisions on which pages to show people and search engines. Since most traffic that comes to HubPages comes from search engines (It will be about 4 million visitors in July), if we prevent the robots from finding the poor content, then we prevent most visitors from it as well. The theory follows that the SEO folks will be less interested in posting the content if it doesn't get traffic or offer SEO benefits.
Jason, anytime you want to discuss spam, let me know.
Posted at 12:04AM on Jul 9th 2007 by Paul Edmondson
1. I agree. I used to be a "Citizen Squid". I've been with them since Beta. But I am appalled ans almost ashamed to be associated with Squidoo any more. They were paying us "Squidizens" for a while, but then they changed the program to "volunteers", and they asked me to change my personal bio page from saying I was a "part-time employee" to "freelancer" because they are SO proud of being able to claim the company only has "4 employees". I like Seth, but the spam has got to be killed or the whole site is going down in flames. I'm not sure how much he cares though, since his most recent book is all about moving on when things go sour. What a shame, it was really cool when it was clean. Glad somebody had the balls to speak the truth - thanks.
Posted at 5:37PM on Jul 7th 2007 by Marti