Link database spam
On Walker-Online I have a small link database, including a form to submit new links. Usually I receive a few suggestions per month but today we got 10 at once and that seems a bit strange.
Where are these coming from? Who ever submitted these links did not even bother to choose the right category – in fact I don’t even have categories for their sites (can you guess, what the sites are about?!). So, did some marketing company which is offering URL submission to more than 1000 sites find a few stupid and desperate marketing managers? The web-server logs tell me, that the link submissions did not come from the same IP address. But the visitors did not visit any other page than the link submission confirmation page, so it probably originates from a special software which even leaves a fake referrer. They did not even visit the form page directly. OK, so I wrote a friendly email to one of the senders to ask, which software they have been using to spam me, but of course the email is invalid. I should have known better!
I removed the ’suggest a link’ form now, since I am not maintaining the database any longer. I used the database mainly as an online bookmark storage for myself but new services like del.icio.us are much more flexible. This is another unfortunate example of marketing driven abuse of open and trusting systems on the internet. Previously I already had to close a guestbook and comments on the blogs have to be protected against spam as well.
Also del.icio.us has this problem as this post by brian illustrates and we all read about the recent manipulations within wikipedia.
Technorati Tags: spam, wikipedia, delicious
