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Online Game Encouraging Spam
An anonymous reader writes "Outwar.com (an online game) has posted instructions on how to spam their unique link using underhanded and fraudulent techniques such as misleading URLs in forums and emails." Evidently by having people click on their link, players gain in-game power. These tips seem to directly contradict their stated spam policy. Shady.
Outwar has been doing this for a long time... various sites with similar demographics (for example, http://www.newgrounds.com/) have had to deal with the issue of spamming Outwar links for years. In most of those places it's bannable, or whatever the equivalent is.
Unfortunately, there's really no way to police something like this... a game that's designed such that the more people you can get to click on your links, the better you do. All you can really do is try to keep people from posting them.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
Allow me to take a moment to clarify: there's a huge difference between the game under discussion, called Outwar and the jetpack-based shooter (ala Starship Troopers, the book) called Outwars, which predated Outwar by half a decade. Singletrac the company is now defunct, but were a bunch of game developers having a great time making great games. Unfortunately, Outwars wasn't one of those great games. But it was a pretty fun game that didn't involve spam :)
Disclaimer: I'm listed twice in the credits for Outwars, once as the network admin, and once as a model. The guy we'd planned on shooting didn't show up, so they stuck overweight, slightly-German-looking me in instead.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write