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not very friendly...

http://books.dreambook.com/nycsdancer/

Well, if you disgree with his standpoint, feel free to sign his guestbook here.....

Taken from dreambook.com:
Name: Michael Franklin
Homepage URL: http://snmmedia.com
Comments: Hi Guys,

I have been reading your column ever since you had a column. I was saddened when I read that your latest column would be your last. I emailed Computer Shopper to voice my support for you and tell them I would never read their publication again and in fact, would probably use my existing pages of CS for some sort of nefarious activity involving dog poop.

I won't uses the pages of your column for puppy pages though, but it is an apt metaphor for how I feel right now. Like CS pooped on us all.

I donated to the cause and have bookmarked your site. You guys are the best and I hope to hear more of your unbiased opinions in the future.

Friday, October 8th 2004 - 01:15:52 PM

Well, as much as I loved computer shopper back in the early 1990s I stopped reading it somewhere in the late 1990s. I saw it recently on a magazine rack and was quite disappointed to see it being thin and boring. I loved to spend hours pouring over its pages looking for deals and daydreaming of the best computer I could buy on my budget. I enjoyed them because they were different not because they were the same. They offered something that made them stand out against all the other magazines. Why they would change formats to be like everyone else I'll never know.

CS didn't let you down when they dropped Alice and Bill's article they let you down years ago when they changed formats. From what I read online I can only imagine that this will continue the downhill slide that CS has taken since I stopped reading it all those years ago.

We run DreamBook, a free guestbook service with about a million members, and recently the guestbook spam started getting to the point we had no choice but to do something about it. We think the way they get the list of our user's URLs is just through a google search (which has the added benefit of returning the most trafficed books where their spam will potentially be the most widely viewed).

Originally the spam was just huge lists of porn sites, from a few specific spammers. To fight that, we kludgingly added some specific urls we wouldn't allow in any post.

They figured that out, and we started getting more from all sorts of different people. So we started adding various heuristics that were kind of lame to block posts (no domains with a - in them for example).

They figured that out, and started to post all sorts of random spam, unrelated to porn, usually with just links to some other dreambook url. We were kind of puzzled about those, because when you went to their dreambook, it was blank. Viewing the source though, they'd added hidden links to their sites at that book. So it seemed they were spamming to get higher google results. Super.

So then we added system-wide a check for the same IP posting to multiple books a lot within a certain amount of time. That worked really well for a few months, but recently they've started using I guess a whole slew of proxies! So finally we now look for any URLs in their posts instead of IPs (they vary the messages they post so there's nothing else you can really look for) and filter on that.

So far it's working okay (but now with some false positives) but it's only a matter of time until they work around that as well.

Bastards!

...just a note to let You know that there is a "virtual" Democracy Wall for mainland China on the web, at

http://books.dreambook.com/vead/tian anmen.html.

This was originally put up to serve as a forum in which residents of the mainland could freely ( and anonymously ) express themselves without fear of government retaliation, in support of the cyber-petition convened by Mr. Wang Dan, located on the web at http://www.june4.org.

Anyone may post their opinions on THE WALL.

...just a note to let You know that there is a "virtual" Democracy Wall for mainland China on the web, at

http://books.dreambook.com/vead/tian anmen.html.

This was originally put up to serve as a forum in which residents of the mainland could freely ( and anonymously ) express themselves without fear of government retaliation, in support of the cyber-petition convened by Mr. Wang Dan, located on the web at http://www.june4.org.

Anyone may post their opinions on THE WALL.