Our "war" with chongqed.com
On Monday, August, 2nd, Joe got an email from one Lior Yashinski of gsdevelops.com. Apparently, gsdevelops.com is a little company that does a little web design and a little SEO. And Lior had done a little spamming while doing his SEO. He had spammed for usagc.us using the keywords online green card, green card, green card lottery, green card lottery online, online green card lottery, immigration, and immigration services.
In his email, he issued an ultimatum. Whithin 48 hours we were supposed to remove usagc.us and his keywords from our database or he would "mess up with your site and get it removed from the search engines".
Since I was on a vacation in that week, Joe told him that he couldn't do anything about that. usagc.us could and would not be removed from our database before I returned. So Lior extended the ultimatum until Sunday. I still wasn't back on Sunday and so I found out on Monday that he had registered chongqed.com.
On this site (which is currently still under construction) he gives a little woozy information about wiki/blog/guestbook spam and about chongqed.org. It looks like he will even have a forum to discuss us. We will not be posting there but there is nothing to stop you from letting him know what people think about web spamming.
Apparently, he didn't like his appearance in our database and "I don't like you people destroying my reputation and even worse!!!! my clients reputation.".
Now, of course it's too bad that spammers don't like us. And it's too bad they don't approve of what we do. But ever since we had the idea for chongqed.org we vaguely felt that spammers might not like what we do. We can live with that. We don't like the spammers, why should they like us?
We are not trying to ruin the reputation of spammers and spamvertized sites. We are only letting people know the truth about those spammers and sites. Attacking wikis, blogs, or guestbooks to promote their pages is what is hurting their reputation by using such deplorable SEO methods. Thousands of people already see and have to put up with removing this spam all around the internet. We just want to help spread the word to more people about this problem and specificly who is doing it. We have had several spammers claim they stopped spamming either because they didn't like the publicity or they realized what they were doing was wrong. All we do is document cases of spamming. If you aren't spamming, you won't end up in our database.
What seems to have upset Lior most was that we posted a warning from the United States Federal Trade Commission about possible fradulent Green Card sites. At the www.dvlottery.state.gov site anyone can register for a chance at a Green Card but only durning a certain time of year. Lior's site will take your money any time of year and register for you when the www.dvlottery.state.gov site starts accepting registrations. Supposedly they also look at the registration and help make sure you fill it out properly. But there is no way of knowing if that happens at all. If you want to register for a green card you are better off doing it at the official website which is completely free of charge.
Some facts about chongqed.org
This silly incident is a good occasion to make clear some facts about chongqed.org that may not have been that clear until now:
- chongqed.org is a community effort. Joe and me have set up this domain and our blogs so that others can link to us if their wikis, blogs, or guestbooks have been spammed. Nobody is forced or tricked into linking to us. If nobody links back to us, chongqed.org will fail and the experiment will not be successful. It's up to the community to decide.
- Spammers repeatedly told us that if the community wanted to get rid of spam, we should simply lock our wikis, blogs, or guestbooks. They repeatedly suggested we issue usernames and passwords, implement CAPTCHA systems, etc. But this is not what the community would like to do. In fact, they'd hate to do that. That is because the wiki system is based on free access by anyone. Blog comments and guestooks, on the other hand, are there so that anyone can comment on anything. Just think about the word guestbook for a moment: apparently, this is something for guests. And how do you treat your guests? Not like potential criminals. And how do you behave when you are the guest somewhere? Not like a vandal.
- Mr. Yashinski has also suggested that maintainers of wikis, blogs, or guestbooks use black-lists of known spammy keywords. At the same time, he doesn't like the idea of chongqed.org. How is that supposed to work? You can easily use chongqed.org's blacklist to block them. Blocking and chongqing are not incompatible. But if you want to block by keyword or url, you will need a list of keywords and/or urls.
- At chongqed.org, we may sometimes try to be a little entertaining, but we never try to ridicule the spammers and if a spammer sends us a message requesting that we remove his name from the site, we usually do that if he can assure us he has stopped spamming. In other words, we have yet to sink to the level of certain spammers that childishly fire up their image processing software to modify pictures they may have found on the web somewhere.
- Yes, there is a slight risk in joining the effort to fight spam. Spammers may retaliate. They may vandalize your wiki, spam your blog even more, leave hundreds of silly messages in your guestbook, put silly pictures of you on their sites, or discriminate against you based on your race, religion, or nationality. Of course, you might say that each such incident is proof of the fact that chongqed.org is working. Spammers would not be pissed off like that if there wasn't some effect of what we are doing.