squared99

“Get your free* ringtones here!!!! Yes, absolutely FREE*!!!!!

It will cost you nothing*, especially on your unlimited* data plans! Be sure you are signed up for unlimited* data plans or you may incur additional download charges.”

I love how throwing a star at the end of word means it doesn’t have to mean what it is supposed to mean. In fact it seems to indicate that you should apply the opposite meaning.

Free actually can mean $4 charges 3 times/week appearing on your phone bill, and unlimited means capped.

This kind of 1984 NuSpeak approach to terms and conditions is great*. I completely support* it, and hope that it continues*. It’s a completely ethical* business approach, and the folks who come up with them are wonderful*!

Ran across this article and forum at Javalobby. Basically a sad tale of a them being pulled off of Google’s main index due to the fact that it got spidered during the exact time it was being slammed with forum spam attacks.

http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t87997.html

Google is valiantly trying to keep garbage off its indexes, and appears to be implementing algorithms to drop or blocklist ‘splog‘ sites [wikipedia], which are springing up all over the web. They are used for everything from your typical porn and gambling, right up to political ‘grass-roots’ strategies. Unfortunately I think legitimate sites that get spammed on their forums may get in caught in the crossfire. Javalobby went from being flooded with traffic to dropping of the face of the web.

A couple of significant items emerge from this. One, it goes to show what a gatekeeper of the Internet Google has become. Javalobby saw a dramatic drop in their usual traffic once it was pulled of the main Google index. Perhaps we should call it Googlenet or Gnet?
Two, we are currently fine tuning the forums on voeveo.com, and at the moment we do not allow anonymous postings. Someone must sign up and sign-in first, we also use a little javascript/ajax mojo there which likely protects us somewhat, but as spammers get more and more sophisticated, this is likely not enough. We will have to implement further verification.

I had a conversation with RingFX, one of the guides on the site, about how a person who submitted a problem report to our forums; our only anonymous but highly controlled posting type, couldn’t anonymously post further comments into that topic. It is exactly because of this fear of spamming.

If this could have such an effect on Javalobby, a well-known site that has been operating for quite some time, imagine what an effect this negative Google rating could have on sites just starting out and attempting to climb up those Google search result rankings. Protection from these types of spam attacks needs to be added to list of must-do’s for all newly starting web site/applications, and spam counter-strategies will have to be utilized continuously throughout a site’s lifetime.

I’m already losing sleep over it ;)