The Butt Ugly Weblog

Wow, this is cool. Just from a physiological point of view it's incredibly interesting. Spammers must certainly realize everything you said about the futility of posting to the sandbox, yet they continue to post. It makes me think of mentally ill people who have no choice but to follow some compulsion. It also makes me think that perhaps someone somewhere is paying these people "per posting" without the means or care to track whether those postings live on and/or are effective. In that respect the "markets" are like the wiki in that the competition itself hurts every player. (I know this has been said about a billion times) But I can't believe there's any profit in spamming at all. Who is it that buys from random links posted in inappropriate contexts like a random wiki sandbox? Logically I think that someone must otherwise it would phase itself out, but perhaps that's naive. Perhaps it's so cheap to go around and post or have robots post that even a one-in-a-million hit rate is profitable. Perhaps this means we need to create tons and tons of sandboxes. If you assume that it's people making these posts (as compared to bots) and that they are a finite resource, then the more bogus sandboxes the less real sites they'd be able to pollute. Ha! We could reduce spam by 50% by just asking every site manager to install a bogus sandbox for every real url they put up. Hmmm, more on this later - call starkiss! Thanks Jan - Scott

--ScottHurlbert, 10-Apr-2008

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