anyone else getting this spam which appears to be harvested from mefi profile pages?

February 8, 2006 12:56 PM

Just curious. I got the following in my in-box, anyone else getting this spam which appears to be harvested from mefi profile pages?

...I saw that you had art related sites, but we know that this doesn't have much to do with poker. As such, we would like to work with you for text space on your Mefi profile. We see ourselves liking Mefi traffic and think you make good posts that can attract people to your profile....

Fools!!! They must not have read my FPPs, good posts indeed, pffft.
posted by edgeways to MetaFilter-Related at 12:56 PM (59 comments total)

please let us know who the email was from so that we can keep an eye peeled for spammy links on profile pages?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 12:57 PM on February 8, 2006

Solotus Consulting, on behaf of some "client in the poker business". Do you want me to sedn you a copy Jess?
posted by edgeways at 1:00 PM on February 8, 2006

Are they aware that user pages are Disallowed?
posted by brownpau at 1:02 PM on February 8, 2006

Obviously someone has ponied up the five bucks to get these email addresses. I had never put my e-mail address anywhere online, and in three years of having it, I didn't get a single peice of spam. Until I put it (in the mildly disquised format it currently appears in currently) on Mefi. Now I get a spam or two each day. That's still remarkably few, but it happened very shortly after MeFi had my address, and had never happened before that in three years of use. This just confirms my suspicion that my Mefi profile is the cause.
posted by raedyn at 1:10 PM on February 8, 2006

Maybe we should put them in touch with that Entab guy and see how spam-linking on MetaFilter worked out for him?

"Hi. Yeah, that's me. No! Absolutely not! Don't spamlink there! Do you have any idea how many phone calls I received? Yeah, I got traffic. I got so much traffic my servers are now a smoking ruin and radioactive dead zone. But no orders! You... you did what!? You damn fool! If you value your life, run! Run, damn it, run!"

That being said, ferret out the host server and contact details, if any. I have free long distance and don't mind politely calling up tools and informing them of the howsits and whatfors.
posted by loquacious at 1:11 PM on February 8, 2006

Sure if you could forward the email to me with full headers (or without if it's too much hassle) that would be cool.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 1:23 PM on February 8, 2006

Why haven't they spammed me? Don't I make good FPPs? How am I gonna make the $5 back without spam farming my user page?
posted by klangklangston at 1:25 PM on February 8, 2006

The Whois information on Solotus Consulting if anyone feels up to it.

15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
[phone]
posted by edgeways at 1:35 PM on February 8, 2006

Edgeways, that's the info for Domains By Proxy, which masks entities wishing to maintain anonymity in their domain whois info.
posted by brownpau at 1:39 PM on February 8, 2006

That's fucked up. I'll see what I can do to stop it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:41 PM on February 8, 2006

ah well :(
posted by edgeways at 1:44 PM on February 8, 2006

"Are they aware that user pages are Disallowed?"

Don't cross this line!

Well, then, don't cross this line!

Mommy!!!
posted by mischief at 1:53 PM on February 8, 2006

"Run, damn it, run!"

They'll never be able to out-run JRUN.
posted by slater at 2:08 PM on February 8, 2006

So far as I can tell, I have never recieved any MeFi spam.
posted by StickyCarpet at 2:27 PM on February 8, 2006

I'm pretty sure I've found the user and sent him a note.

To prevent any gaming, I've also added rel="nofollow" to everyone's homepage URL and any URLs in your blurb/bio area, so there will be no search engine juice from now on.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:29 PM on February 8, 2006

Fucking A. Thanks spammers, there goes how I get my sites into Google.
posted by yerfatma at 2:55 PM on February 8, 2006

Wow, a JRUN joke. It's been awhile.
posted by youarenothere at 3:12 PM on February 8, 2006

Hmph. Selling out your profile page to spammers is so 2003...
posted by crunchland at 3:39 PM on February 8, 2006

To prevent any gaming, I've also added rel="nofollow" to everyone's homepage URL and any URLs in your blurb/bio area, so there will be no search engine juice from now on.

What kind of gaming is that supposed to prevent? Are people signing up with multiple accounts just to link to the same page over and over to increase pagerank?

Eh, there goes my one whole pagerank hit. Joy!
posted by loquacious at 3:48 PM on February 8, 2006

I get quite a bit of spam to the email account I posted to my profile. I thought it was caused by buying a Metafilter coffee cup online.
I am much too polite to read mail not really addressed to me, so I drop by gmail every now and then and delete it.
posted by Cranberry at 3:59 PM on February 8, 2006

I get so much spam at my listed address that I wouldn't know if Mefi was to blame.
posted by cortex at 4:02 PM on February 8, 2006

The only email account I have that gets an appreciable amount of spam is the one in my profile. Don't know that there is a connection but...
posted by Carbolic at 4:49 PM on February 8, 2006

I want a 1-800 number posted for those doofuses, because I fully intend to call them and give them hell.

In sort, I want them Price-Rite'd out of business.
posted by five fresh fish at 5:02 PM on February 8, 2006

Oh, irony of ironies, you go to Solotus' homepage and their contact info is obfuscated to prevent spamming.

And that was "in short," not "in sort."
posted by five fresh fish at 5:05 PM on February 8, 2006

I've gotten fewer than a dozen spams at my listed address, unless you include the occasional solicitation for music that is really, really bad. I doubt that MeFi has anything to do with it.
posted by Tuwa at 5:26 PM on February 8, 2006

I have a separate account for use on my MetaFilter profile page and so far as I know I've never received any spam through it. (And I do check those things.)
posted by kindall at 5:57 PM on February 8, 2006

I'm pretty sure I've found the user and sent him a note.

What? No angry mob justice? I'm disappointed....
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:12 PM on February 8, 2006

I have a separate account for use on my MetaFilter profile page and so far as I know I've never received any spam through it. (And I do check those things.)

Likewise. I have a Metafilter-only address and I have never received spam through it. And I check these things.
posted by event at 6:17 PM on February 8, 2006

Matt, can I ask how you figured out who the culprit was? From the info provided in this thread I have no idea how you'd begin the search...
posted by jonson at 6:41 PM on February 8, 2006

jonson-my guess is that he looked up who'd loaded edgeways's profile recently, which would narrow it down enough to give him a really good hunch.
posted by evariste at 6:50 PM on February 8, 2006

Dammit, I wanted balls for breakfast. I'm sick of corporate assclowns screwing with my trust networks.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:55 PM on February 8, 2006

I got the email edgeways got (from jessamyn). It has an originating IP. I checked for similar IP ranges on recent comments, found a bunch of users using it (it's a popular company that does DSL). I tried one of the newest users and bam, they had a poker website in their profile. A whois on the IPs they used in email and comments came up with a range that put both in the same location (city, state).

I had banned their earlier ID for some reason (could have been spamming, dunno, I should write the reasons down somewhere), so I banned the new one. Then I added the nofollow stuff to make gaming the user pages pointless.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:24 PM on February 8, 2006

I have been on PNAC's payroll for years now. They see lots of potential in the Metafilter demographic, apparently.
posted by Krrrlson at 7:33 PM on February 8, 2006

I joined metafilter for the great gaming spam!
posted by Astro Zombie at 8:02 PM on February 8, 2006

What kind of gaming is that supposed to prevent? Are people signing up with multiple accounts just to link to the same page over and over to increase pagerank?

Well presumably even a single link from a high-ranked site to another could influence its PR. Of course this doesn't make sense in the face of the fact that the profile pages were disallowed in robots.txt so they wouldn't even be in google's index. Regardless, adding rel=nofollow pretty much seals the deal.

Or perhaps the person's plan was to try to convince prolific submitters to add links to their profile just so that when someone clicks on the person's profile from reading one of their fine posts, they would see the text ad. Of course I don't think many prolific meta posters would fall for such a thing. So this pretty much just illustrates rule #3.
posted by Rhomboid at 9:05 PM on February 8, 2006

I have a question:

Where can I go to find great online gambling?
posted by shmegegge at 9:15 PM on February 8, 2006

I didn't get it. And I gotta tell ya, I feel a little let down...
posted by mkultra at 9:39 PM on February 8, 2006

mathowie & associates: grade-A Columbo-style investigation
posted by NinjaPirate at 2:26 AM on February 9, 2006

NinjaPirate : "mathowie & associates: grade-A Columbo-style investigation"

While I was reading Matt's description of his search for the culprit I was waiting for him to write "...and then I located his coordinates, fired up Google Earth and got a print screen of his house, car and dog included. I attached the picture to the email I sent them, along with the words 'And please remember, we know where you live".
posted by nkyad at 5:44 AM on February 9, 2006

I wanna lynch something!
posted by tiamat at 5:58 AM on February 9, 2006

Where can I go to find great online gambling?

Here.
posted by eriko at 6:25 AM on February 9, 2006

Whoever's sending me the "KNOCK DOWN TREES with your GIANT COCK" spam can knock it off, now.
posted by horsewithnoname at 7:37 AM on February 9, 2006

Send them a friendly note. :)

[e-mail]
posted by Optimus Chyme at 7:51 AM on February 9, 2006

Wait, why do we need nofollow on user pages when the user pages are already excluded from indexing by robots.txt anyway?
posted by brownpau at 8:02 AM on February 9, 2006

words fail to describe how disgusting this is. good luck rooting it out, mods.
posted by ori at 9:06 AM on February 9, 2006

What had annoyed me the most about the email was it got though my spam blockers by, I assume, using my name as posted on the profile page, then again in the main text of the message... so it was a very personal spam.
I sent a terse obscene reply which hasn't bounced So I assume the email address [e-mail] works and goes to somebody
posted by edgeways at 10:27 AM on February 9, 2006

oh, and really I fail to see how they thought this would be a good long term strategy. All it would take is 1 person doing what I did to blow their cover, and considering it would take an actual physical click through from a profile page I imagine the amount of traffic they generated verses the amount of work that went into getting it much have been a horrible ratio. Especially considering they must have targeted newer, low-to mid level profile users, people who, in other words, would not generate large numbers of people to click on their profile page.
posted by edgeways at 10:32 AM on February 9, 2006

I'm just trying to figure out how to pronounce "Solotus."

Is it like "Dude, that's so Lotus"?

I also love the "Search" box on their site, which does nothing. (There are a couple of input elements but no form element.)
posted by staggernation at 11:21 AM on February 9, 2006

Huh. I guess I am late to the party, but I am not sure where the outrage comes from. I would guess people link to their own commercial ventures in their profile. I have no problem with explicitly disallowing the use of the profile page for paid advertising purposes, but I seem to be missing why this is so obviously reprehensible. It's not even spam, so far as I can tell - From the other post on the topic, it seems these guys asked specific users for some reason or other.
posted by mzurer at 4:38 PM on February 9, 2006

oh, and really I fail to see how they thought this would be a good long term strategy.

Marketers are clueless whoremonkeys and will do anything that gets them into the panties of the holy buck. No huge mystery.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:39 PM on February 9, 2006

edgeways and mzurer, it's link spam, plain and simple. They are not trying to get humans to click on anything, they don't want actual people to follow links to some poker site. They want the Googlebot to see it and index it from MetaFilter's domain (which has a high pagerank of 8/10 -- pagerank being a rank of how "important" a site is, and it takes years of high quality stuff to get above 7).

This isn't marketing, it's spamming for searchbots. If they could get a bunch of metafilter people to link to some site and some slashdot people, and say, digg people, then they'd have three high quality, link-rich sites pointing to some dumbass poker site, and lo and behold, the site would rise in rankings since three reputable sites lended their vote of confidence by linking to them. It's how SEO scams work -- they are advertising campaigns designed for search engine robots.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 5:49 PM on February 9, 2006

This isn't marketing, it's spamming for searchbots.

I say potaeto, you say potahto. Spam is marketing for bottomfeeders.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:06 PM on February 9, 2006

Until I put it (in the mildly disguised format it currently appears in currently) on Mefi. Now I get a Spam or two each day.

Just out of curiosity, why do people assume that email addresses written in the form "someone at somewhere dot com" are not going be spidered? It would be incredibly easy to spider for email addresses in that format.
posted by delmoi at 7:54 PM on February 9, 2006

delmoi, I can't speak for everyone, but I thought I would be protected from bots due to the fact that
1) e-mail info only dispalys registered users
2) even if you replaced "at" with "@", and "dot" with ".", it SITLL wouldn't work

Obviously, I've learned the hard way that I was wrong, and I should have stuck with my policy of not putting that info anywhere on the web in any form. My bad.
posted by raedyn at 7:30 AM on February 10, 2006

Yeah, raedyn, the problem with obfuscating one's email is that if the obfuscation scheme becomes at all common, it's no good anymore. You have to be relatively inventive, and trust in the creative parsing abilities of your readers, if you want to broadcast an email and not have it snatched up by a bot, I reckon.
posted by cortex at 7:52 AM on February 10, 2006

I still thought/hoped/whatever the fact that only registered users could see the info would help. But apparently that info is worth the 5 buck threshold to whomever has now harvested it.
posted by raedyn at 8:18 AM on February 10, 2006

Several thousand functioning email addresses, many of them potentially virginal? Depressingly attractive.

Lesson: never use a good email address anywhere ever. Ever.
posted by cortex at 8:28 AM on February 10, 2006

Raedyn: There are still plenty of ways to obscure it, such as raedynREMOVE @email.com. Combining a couple of different obscuring methods seems to work for me.
posted by klangklangston at 8:28 AM on February 10, 2006

If you don't want spam, don't use email.

This method:
raedynREMOVE @email.com
is "easy" to unobfuscate.

I'd be very suprised if email address spider scripts don't include a huge array of regexes to unscramble email addresses.
posted by cellphone at 5:00 PM on February 10, 2006