There’s another of those Q&As coming soon – this time my answers to questions from a Chelsea site – and this is just a bit of pre-season housekeeping.
But I wanted to salute Will, Sam and the others at footballunited.com for having, overnight, passed the 5,000 mark in blocking a path to this site for the cretins, charlatans and geeks who make up the fast-growing international army of internet spammers.
This article has nothing to do with football. Nor had any of the spam that I spent time clearing out of the comments field of various Salut! Sunderland postings this morning …
Last week, at Salut! Sunderland’s parent site Salut!, I defended news aggregators such as newsnow.co.uk against charges of being web parasites, since they send genuinely interested readers to the homes of original work (newspaper websites, blogs etc). But I haven’t quite finished with the real web parasites.
Whose e-mail address do you reckon is cookforlife34@hotmail.com? What about Tifft23@gmail.com; kurns83@gmail.com; xenithpow@hotmail.com; Blyler10@gmail.com and Bohnker@gmail.com?
What is My Dish? Who runs the wonderfully misnamed http://loose-belly-fat.org (assuming that loose fat, ideal for attaching to the stomach, is not what the service provides at an appropriate price)?
The day began just hoping for three points against Spurs, a tall order but not beyond us. This rant came on as I found yet again that there was a mini-epidemic of spamming and phishing to deal with …
Since we exposed the odious activites of someone or something calling him/itself Andrew A Sailer, the name has been refreshingly absent from the comments left at Salut! Sunderland and other Salut! sites.
No game this weekend – though we should, of course, have been playing Southampton in the FA Cup – so it seems the right time to deal with a spot of necessary admin: how to combat a scourge of the internet age …
Salut! Sunderland, and its sister sites Salut! , Salut! Live and Salut! North, have been infested by an ugly, virulent pest called the website parasite.
The aim of the people posting comments which appear at first glance to be genuine, but can quickly be seen to be bogus and probably generated by computers, is to produce artificially inflated stats for visits to their own, usually unrelated sites or promote Viagra, medicines or whatever else they are trying to flog.