Slashdot Mirror
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.
Some games are just plain more like real life every day.
It's good to have someone non-anonymous that you can sue for the spam you get
All your spam are belong to us
This outrageous!
PS: Check out this neat website...
Funny Pictures!
So this "game" is to exercise those skills gained from years of hidden goatse.cx link posting, and to trick people into going to their ad-filled site.
:)
At least if people have an outlet, maybe they won't post so many hidden goatse links.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Seems like that Outwar is trying to get as many people into it as possible, no matter what inteligence level they have.
;)
Getting slashdotted, seems to have served their purpose
Note also that this is linkspam, as opposed to emailspam. Not that this makes it ethical or anything...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
This is the crappiest thing I've ever seen. I mean, now not only do we have professional spammers innundating us with massive amounts of lame vi4gr4 but now every cretinous AOLer who plays this game will be telling all his friends "j00 have too see these funny pictures!!! Their great!"
If any of my friends managed to get a single power point from me I would rag on them for the rest of their short, pathetic lives. Every time they logged into their email they'd receive a deluge of the worst, most heinous spam and goatse links.
Step 1: Set up a sneaky and misleading links so you can trick your "friends" repeatedly to go to some stupid site for your benefit. ... "they will have no idea it is going to bring them to your secret link page. You tricked them again!"
Step 2: "Send your friends the link"
Step 3: Profit!!! (well, kind of anyways)
Step 4: Wonder why you have no friends anymore.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
So the purpose of the game is to get people to click on your links. Each page is a PHP page which makes an MySQL query.
I dare say that being put on Slashdot will bring the server to it's knees.
FAQ
The purpose of outwar is to develop your character by gaining power and earning money.
How do I gain power? Every time someone clicks on your secret link, your character will gain power. Try placing your secret link somewhere people will see it; such as in your profile, away message, or a web page.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I tried the link and got a message saying my connection was refused. Not down or broken, but refused. I wonder if they're blocking everyone with slashdot in the referrer.
"Now serving NO Adware and NO ActiveX pop-ups!"
So...is anyone *really* surprised after that?
One of the communities that I run has 25,000 registered users who are active on the discussion boards. As a matter of practice, if somebody posts one of these bullshit links, the post is immediately removed, and both the user account and the IP are banned.
I just don't have any patience for that shit.
-Waldo Jaquith
Wow, a whole page on how to trick your friends into looking at ads. Good luck getting them to read you emails ever again! (Of course, it sounds like nobody over 16 plays this game, so the target audience is probably pretty gullible.)
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
By writing a script that will access a random referer ID. Considering it uses just plain standard HTTP, this wouldn't be much of an issue. Unfortunately, they got a system so that you can only click one of their damned links every 5 minutes, but I'm sure some rudementary IP spoofing will get through that. Ethical? No. Legal? Not really. Justified? Very.
Fight fire with fire.
Hate me!
RTFA, they explain how to make that either not appear, or appear as something else.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
These tips seem to directly contradict their stated spam policy.
As sleazy as I think this is, it does not technically violate their anti-SPAM policy which forbids sending unsolicited e-mails, and posting off-topic messages to newsgroups.
The page in question just suggests that you add the links to existing messages, not that you create new ones just to promote the links. They specifically tell you not to post messages to random message boards, and that mass e-mails are considered SPAM.
Of course, I would never buy a game that promotes "how to trick your friends", but that's just me.
Oh my, I finally get it! Roland Piquepaille is playing Outwar! ;)
Oh man, but do they do it. About a year ago, the AIM chatrooms still somewhat existed, and I went into Gaming or Computing chat every now and then.
Once outwar started, spam came left and right. People set up bots, and reporting them didn't do any good. Outwar does not care for their own spam policy.
After a while, I stopped chatting on AIM. The spam was unbearable. When there weren't porn bots, there were outwar or "Kings of Chaos" bots. Sometimes they tricked people by setting up a redirecion link, or threaten to only stop if their link was clicked.
Ugh. I HATE Outwar.
I would never buy a game
Good, because it's free. How do you think they get so many assinine 12 year old AOL users to sign up and spam the living fuck out of every message board and guestbook they can find?
This is completly old news. Many, MANY people have been doing this for a long time. Geez, welcome to 1999.
Flat Screen TV for F
I am not surprised at this announcement, people have been spamming these links through various online forums for quite some time now. They do absolute noting to fix this spamming problem, and their so called "anti-spam" policy is a joke.
The only way to succeed in these "games" is to get the most clicks, and to accomplish this you have to spam your link through various sites. Also these sites tend to offer prizes as an incentive for people to play and spam.
If they really wanted to kill spamming they would use a confirm system that only logs clicks after the link clicker registers to play. Of course that would greatly reduce the numbers of people clicking, viewing the site and its advertisements, would make it harder for the spammers to get anywhere, and pretty much kill the only fun thing about these so called games.
That is why sites like this love the referral based system, and set them up in their favor. They like this because they are able to blame the spammer and claim no responsibility for the spam, while on the side encouraging and helping people to do this abuse. Other fun things they can do with a referral system is can claim that they killed a spammer, only to transfer them to a new account or kill it till the heat dies off. Most sites like this allow the spammer to sing back up without any problems. They can also chose to ignore the abuse reports and allow the spammer to keep at it.
So it is easy to see why they do this, if they had to do confirmations through signups their game wouldn't last very long. The only way to get those clicks to their site and people to continue playing is by allowing spamming.
Web page hit counters aside, I remember having a similar game spammed in one of the board I frequently went to. Someone set up an account to post the link to a game just like the outwars one. This one involved vampires, you being bitten by one, becoming a vampire, and recruiting people through clicks.
While things at first were not that bad, this particular poster kept spamming it, trying to hide the real intent of the link by claiming it was to something related to the site, and even signing up new accounts to spam the forum. We tried to get the site runner to do something about this potential problem, but they ignored it and had a similar "don't spam, nudge nudge wink wink" type disclaimer.
Since the runner didn't want do anything about the spamming, those of us who posed there had a lot of fun screwing with their system. Fun things include filling their "victims" part with names like "FUCK_OFF_SPAMMERS" and "*Referral's Name* Eats Shit," seeing how much crap we could feed their system, seeing if we could break their code(which was easy since their programming was very shitty(i.e. they didn't put any boundaries on character input)), etc.
I also recall that newgrounds had a similar problem, a lot of people were making flash movies that would just open their outwars referral link. Newgrounds solution was to ban any one doing stunts like this, and people who spammed outwars html links. I haven't gone back there, so I don't know how well they combated that.
Oh yes, that's one "informative" post.
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
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
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
These spam games are utterly worthless. A friend asked me to play Kings of Chaos which works the same as outwar with her for a little while. She kept telling me "Try it, you will like it". Bascially, the more clicks you get on your link, the larger your "army" growns and you gain more gold. But you can only click the link once a day. Most of the players on there have "buddy click lists" and just sit around clicking each others links all day.
Anyway, to make my army grow, I posted a few links here on slashdot, and also on the USENET. Within a day I had 800 soldiers (clicks) much to the amazment of my friend. I quit playing after that.
Several people here on slashdot said they reported me, but my account was never cancelled, nor was I warned. These games are nothing but spam factories and they have no regard for their users spamming their links all over.