> The spammers know they are being disruptive, they just don't care unless it >is their site.
You're probably right a lot of the time, but I'm not sure it's true in every case. This is what surprised me most when I came across all this information linked off sickseo .co.uk about how to use "off site SEO" software. It looks like there's quite a separation between the bad guys who develop this software (and who also do things like finding lists of vulnerable websites), and then the breed of dumb "SEO experts" who buy the software and use it to run their "campaigns". I think the latter could quite easily be unaware that they're doing something wrong. > > We can at least comment on them and vote them down (Youtube finds quite a > > lot of similar videos) > > Please dont do that. All thats gonna accomplish is that the videos will > rise in the search rankings (yes, even the downrating does that). Surprised by this. You think if we all go here http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=off+page+seo+youtube and downvote these videos, google will rank the video higher? Possible I suppose. Anyway that's not necessarily a big problem. If the video gets attention from more right-thinking people who will work to combat this, then that's a good thing. Also the aim would be to provide *some* indication to dumb SEO people, that there are people out there suffering on the receiving end of these tools, because currently there is no such indication. > > How about unleashing a bit of "ethical hacking" e.g. DDOS attacks on people > > distributing > > this software? > > You can go to jail for that, in a lot of places. Even if they DDoS'd > you first, and you DDoS'd them back, you'd be more likely to go to > jail than them, because being an amateur, you'd be more likely to slip > up in some traceable way. Well yeah. Partly I was mentioning this just to throw them to the wolves. I appreciate you don't want to be seen to be recommending breaking the law, but really if you're reading this and you have a way of disrupting the operations of edwinsoft .com (for example) legally or illegally you'd be doing the world a favor in my opinion. I wouldn't attempt anything outright illegal myself, but there's a some interesting legally grey approaches. Remember "spam vampire" and the lycos antispam screensaver? Sort of an opt-in DDOS attack. O'rielly article from way back in 2004: http://www.oreillynet.com/network/2004/12/03/chongq.html I like the quote towards the end there: "Using purely defensive means has not worked. It is like someone throwing punches at you and all you do is hold your arms over your face to fend off the blows," "has not worked" is too strong of course. Defensive means can and do work ok *if* you know how to set them up, and if you keep checking back to make sure it is working. On an internet-wide scale, looking across all the mediawiki installs and attempted mediawiki installs out there, and looking at the experience of new folks trying install MediaWiki... wiki spam remains a big problem. Halz _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
