Friday, June 04, 2004

Reformed Nigritude Ultramarine Spammer

Well, only about a day since I posted about Nigritude Ultramarine wiki spam we got a very interesting email from Matt. Several wikis he is involved with have been hit by Nigritude spammers. This particular SEO contestant has realized he was spamming and decided to quit. And after some more discussion about links in SandBoxes really are spam he has finally begun to understand why it was wrong. Spamming only SandBox pages is still spamming!

Here are some of Philipp's quotes:

His original post telling people to spam Wikis.

His second post telling people NOT to spam Wikis anymore.

And there has been lots of discussion about the matter (including mine and Matt's).

Since I don't want to help even a reformed Nigritude spammer's PageRank I ran all his links through bloggers redirect.

Comments:
"Since I don't want to help even a reformed Nigritude spammer's PageRank I ran all his links through bloggers redirect."

You are playing the Google game now, do you?

What if I call those people polluting the Google results with Wiki Sandboxes which do not belong there ... spammers?
I would not call it spam but you seem to use this word in a very broad definition, making it look like I set out to do evil, and I could easily reverse the argument.
For chrissake if I would be out to do evil I would have spammed Wiki *front-pages* -- they got a much higher PageRank.

I never asked people to spam anything, I explained a SEO strategy that was put to use before me -- just that it was more or less *hidden & secret* before I explained it. If this gets people thinking about defense mechanisms, or how to write a Sandbox which automatically empties itself (easy solution) then all for the better.
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You may not have "asked" people to spam, but you certainly implied they should since it would help in the stupid Nigritude game so much.

From your comment, it sounds like you see yourself as a hero for helping "uncover" and suggest easy solutions to the problem? Spamming wikis was not hidden or secret before you "explained" it, just no one else was publicly saying people should do it. And it wasn't on the front page of Slashdot. Those of us who use and contribute to wikis already know about wiki spam. The wiki spam problem has been going on for a long while now, I just didn't know about it till pretty recently.

If you actually read a few other posts here (not only the ones referring to you directly), you would realize professional spammers don't only spam sandboxes. So your "genius" solution to cleaning out sandboxes is not a real solution. As I and many others explained on your comments page, there are reasons not to clean out the sandbox page.

You may not be out to do evil, but you certainly aren't out to do good. You should notice that I have been referring to you as a Nigritude spammer and others as commercial or real spammers in posts that deal with your type of spam. No matter how you want to spin it, you were still a spammer and encouraged a lot of people to spam with you. You even warn people that its going to be deleted so they should return and replace their spam.

I agree Wiki sandboxes shouldn't be indexed in google, there is no reason for it. But they aren't spamming Google, spamming requires doing it on purpose. And Sandboxes are not going to be top rankings for anything but a search for "sandbox." But as I have said, SandBox spam is not the main target of wiki spam.

I am sure you have already realized and are happy that all the controversy over your postings is really going to help you in the game. Your getting lots of links all over the place from people that don't mean to help you. So it really makes sense that you keep provoking more discussion by saying how you did nothing wrong.
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