Who loves me, baby?
I had thought that I would need a few links to my port 41 rant in order to own them on Google. Silly of me: not only is Google fairly fond of me, but I failed to notice one of the biggest drawbacks of their system. Anything that you include in a page through a Javascript document.write is completely invisible to search engines. That makes your blog unsearchable, and makes a fair bit of their home page unsearchable as well. I suppose there are times when that would be a good thing, but it sure isn’t good when you are trying to get your business known (known for something other than being owned by a moron spammer, that is). Just to add to their charm, looks like among the comments that they have deleted was one from Michel V. (or “Michael”, as they call him) of b2, one of the nicest and most helpful developers of weblog software you could ever hope to not alienate. Not much left to do but find a way to piss off Dave Winer.
Google also reveals the fact that port41’s spamming campaign is not just limited to bloggers. They have been spamming linux related mailing lists and various newsgroups. And I think it’s kind of strange that the newsgroup spams titled WindowsXP.co.uk – Writers Wanted and Syndicate Your Content FOR FREE!! have identical message bodies, e-mail addresses, and ip addresses, yet the commenter from windowsxp.co.uk praises the performance of port41 as if he were simply a satisfied customer with no affiliation. I guess that they don’t realize that despite the low quality of their product, they could get a lot more people interested if they would just be honest and use normal channels of communication.
Yeah, the choice of Linux lists seemed a little odd to me, too. Maybe those are just the only ones they spammed that are web-archived where nobody bothered to delete it.
They have 2~3 other ”virtual satisfied customers” there. They posted comments on a post, that got deleted with the first load of anti-spam comments, then commented the same thing on the second load, then commented the same thing, but this time with inverted names/messages!, on the third and present load. All the times the messages were the same, same letters, same punctuation.
Come to think of it, I would sell such bots. That would prove to be a market to take advantage off. ”hi, I’m lauching a new product, can I rent some of your Virtual Satisfied Customers ?”
Sounds like a plan. I know of at least one customer that would be interested.
something wrong at the ohkay coral there phil.
everytime I mouseover a link the entire post dissapears!
Yeah, one of IE6’s less charming features. If it could manage to do it regularly, so you could actually test just exactly what it doesn’t like, I would try to fix it, but just like the ALA scrolling bug, it’s just a sometimes thing. Maybe I’ll just dump all a:hover and see if that fixes it (though I think I tried that first time I saw it).