Slashdot Mirror
'Online Poker' Googlebomb
Philipp Lenssen writes "The blogger community is fighting back, though in ways not everyone may like: they are Googlebombing the Wikipedia page on online poker for the phrase "online poker" to make it rank higher in search engines. "Online poker", along with "Viagra", "mortgage" and "debt", are keywords heavily represented in comment spam, which itself aims to boost the Google ranking for a particular site and phrase. The Wikipedia page is currently third in Google."
But you didn't even go to the trouble of linking the term online poker to Wikipedia in your submission? Slashdot has some healthy pagerank, too, ya know.
Yeah, messing with bloggers might not have been the best idea...
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Do they think that if they make the Wiki ONLINE POKER page #1 that nobody will go to the other 9 online poker page results returned by Google on the same page?
It don' make no sense!
It goes to #1.
Is it any wonder why many /.ers hate bloggers and blogging?
On one hand, it seems that "stooping" to the level of spammers seems as evil as the spamming itself.
On the other hand, maybe this is an appropriate response -- fighting fire with fire.
Only time will tell if the cure is worse than the disease... but at the moment, I think it's kind of cool to use the spammers' own tactics against them.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
Wikipedia's slow as a turd as it is. Thanks guys!
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Google Bombing is used to get your one page higher, it doesn't do anything to the other sites' ranking except to the single site you may displace off the top 10 results.
Yes, I read the article. This seems to be a "fight fire with fire" solution and is probably just going to make things worse.
The stupid online poker comment spam *is* annoying, yes, but is Googlebombing Wikipedia really a viable solution?
The Wiki didn't come up 3rd when I looked a few minutes ago (it was 5th) and doesn't Google specifically say "Don't do stuff like this!" in their help documentation?
I hope this doesn't backfire.
I can't see this as a good thing.
1. Blog spammers will fight back at blogs - mostly innocient people who have nothing to do with this war.
2. Blog spam can get wikipedia in trouble by violating Google's guildelines.
3. The recent nofollow tag attribue will dimish the value of blog spam.
Could the slashdotting have triggered a protection against google-bombing?
but how the hell does this help? The online casino people are still going to spam your blog. Just because one link out of the 31 million pages wont deter a user. There are paid ads anyways. This is a waste of time if you ask me. A better way to combat this would be to come together to maybe come up with a plugin or hack to have a 100% system against spam.
So the online casinos would be forced to stop auto spamming people.
Of course this trouble will never end if these companies have like little gnomes manually spamming blog/blog rings.
Seems like an awful lot of work to boost that particular result...
I gotta agree with the article... buy more text ads...
And linking Online Poker to Wikipedia will help because? These bloggers have way too much time on their hands. I'm pretty sure the absence of blogs would result in significant productivity gains at most American companies.
A good example is a search on "to be or not to be". Even in quotes, 2 or so of the top 10 results are dross: they do not even contain the phrase. Google has some great things, like so many more results and caching, but it is annoying to have bogus results come up like this. If they, by default, actually returned only the pages that contained what you were looking for, the googlebombing "abuse" problem would vanish. There is a keyword (either noanchor or inanchor?) that ensures that Google produces accurate, relevante results, but you have to type it in.
Even more importantly, it would get rid of the bogus/irrelevant results in searches and make the search experience a lot better. You'd only get online poker sites containing "onlike poker".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The poker sites themselves are not directly to blame, however it's their affiliate programs such as this one which encourage the spamsters.
As you can see they can be quite lucrative. Spammers also post poker site's software to Usenet and p2p networks together with a bonus code that benefits their account, with some steady play these bonuses can be cleared in no time leaving themselves a tidy profit.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
If the counter-bombers can counter-bomb, then the spammers can counter-counter-bomb, and so on. This sounds like nuclear war, but with keywords.
The only problem is, the automated robots that Google et. al. use are based on rules, and those rules will ALWAYS be able to be reverse-engineered by spammers.
Is there any way out of this?
(And please don't just say, "Google can just hire a bunch of people to look at stuff" because that won't scale to billions of Internet pages).
Ideas anybody?
Willy on Wheels is the ultimate Wikipedia vandal!
Is Google doing anything to stop Google bombing? Is there anything they can do? I'm hoping Google will improve their GoogleBot so that sites that Google bomb to get into the top ten ranking stop getting in the top ten ranking, unless they truely what the user wants to see (informative). Wikipedia is likely to be quite informative though, so IMO this particular Google bomb is justified.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
The Wikipedia page is currently third in Google.
And the Wikipedia page is not protected right now which means that the spammers or trollers can add their links directly to that page by clicking edit this page link and their changes will be visible immediately. Wikipedia administrators can protect that page by clicking this link and adding {{vprotected}} at the top of the article to protect it from vandalism.
or at least consider replacing all such references with Kwazai or other incredibly silly cultural references that are unlikely to be widely used by most Netizens.
After all, wouldn't it be better for Google to bring up a totally useless page in high-rank order than to help the spamsters?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If I were to search for "online poker" I'd be sure to read the TITLE and the two lines or so that Google gives you from the site to figure out if it was a relevant result or not.
If I already know what online poker is, there's no need for me to go to a wikipedia page, no matter how high it's listed. Conversely, if I'm not interested in playing, I'm not going to go to some site unless I haven't had my daily dose of cookies.
Very few people use the "I'm feeling lucky" button (I remember reading some really low percentage on the Google website, forget what exactly it was) so even getting this site to #1 won't affect discerning users.
All right, you can make the argument that people are stupid and click blindly. Problably. But most people realize after a few seconds if they've gone to an irrelevant result.
Except in this case, what they are doing isn't really spamming. The Wikipedia page actually does include valuable information on the topic of online poker.
Well, at least, I'm guessing it does. I haven't been to it myself.
Looks like the wiki entry is already first for "online poker".
I have had a problem with blog/forum/bbs spam on my web site for allmost a year. I get about 200 attepts to post gambling, mortgage, or porn spam to my BBS. Most of it comes through open proxy servers which are being accessed by zombie computers. Thus two levels of masking.
The strangest spam I got was for a french buldog site.
I have developed some methods for controling it, but I do not want to divulge them publiclly since the bad guys would then know my counter measures.
...slow as a turd...
Dude, buy a laxative. Remember, Elvis died straining at his stool.
Wouldn't it make more sense to put up a link that would have a possible affect on the spammers' business? I would have gone for a site intended to fight gambling addiction...
Stupid.
Could someone please explain what they're trying to accomplish here? This makes no sense to me at all. In any way.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
It might cost the bloggers more in the longrun since Google and other pageranking search engines might lower the bloggers rank relevance values.
Assuming that this isn't just a poorly thought out knee-jerk reaction, it could be that this is an attempt by the bloggers to exercise the nuclear option. The more worthless blog comments are as Google material, the more likely Google is to start ignoring or devaluing them as much as possible. This, presumably, would reduce the enthusiasm of spammers for continuously pounding the bloggers.
yo wtf does some dude sucking his own dick have to do with online poker?
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
EGAD WIKI-HAX! =\
Support Liberty, Support Ron Paul
...has appearantly linked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_poker to "autofellatio.jpg". Wikipedia was a bad choice, what with the inherent ability for *anyone* to alter the page.
Nah... ICE CUBE RULEZ!
That does seem strange. If it was a French Bullfrog site instead, it would be quite understandable.
"I have developed some methods for controling it, but I do not want to divulge them publiclly since the bad guys would then know my counter measures"
Yeah, I know. Those French bulldog guys play hardball. They monitor all the Slashdot posts, too, so you are wise not to reveal your tricks. I know myself, that every time someone mods me down, it has to be one of those bulldog spammers.
"Click on http://www.parismastiff.com for your best Gallic bulldog deals!"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Well, no surprises here: it turns out that the vapid tools who maintain "blogs" really are as stupid as they seem.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
Am I the only one who saw a fucking DISTURBING image when loading this page?
Or is the "Online Poker" page redirecting to a picture of a guy trying to suck his own penis? I'm not being a troll, trying to be funny, nothing, I'm being serious...
Did someone rig the page to redirect to that or something? Because I was expecting text, not... disturbing... pictures.
Here's some information on Online Poker incase anyone isn't familiar with it.
I've had a lame little blog for the past 9 months or so, mainly just a place for me to repost links for my friends to see. Anyway, in the last 3 months or so the comment spam has been really out of control. I have filters setup in a way that the comment spam never makes it to my page, but what it does do is generate about 100 emails to my admin account everytime that goddamn online poker motherfucker spams my server. Every email reads something like this:
0 .252.73.2
From: xxxx@xxxxxxx.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Message-Id:
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 01:01:45 -0500 (EST)
A new comment on the post #66 "I'm Back" is waiting for your approval
Author : free online poker (IP: 160.252.73.2 , slsconf.shinshu-u.ac.jp)
E-mail : qyhsfto@a5af13b6415e47154138bf629771e475b.com
URL : http://online-----poker.com
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=16
Comment:
poker tips - WPT, free poker online | poker books - texas holdem, world poker tour | internet poker - partypoker, texas hold'em poker | partypoker - poker books, party poker | poker rooms - poker tournaments, paradise poker | online poker - partypoker, partypoker | poker - poker rules, online poker rooms | empire poker - world poker tour, online poker sites | paradise poker - poker games, internet poker | internet poker - poker stars, paradise poker | poker stars - internet poker, poker tips | world poker tour - poker tips, poker tournaments | poker online - poker chips, poker tips
To approve this comment, visit: http://xxxxxxxxx.com/fakeurl
To delete this comment, visit: http://xxxxxxxxxxx.com/fakeurl
Currently 146 comments are waiting for approval. Please visit the moderation panel:
http://fakeurl.com/moderation
[snip]
He does it from zombies so it's a different IP address every time, and recently they've stopped putting anything with the word "poker" in the comments because they figured out that by now most bloggers have the keyword poker filtered and the comments never reach the page.
You know what is the most aggravating thing of all? Even though none of the comments have ever made it through my moderation system, the fuckers still try and spam my server every single day!!! It's aggravating beyond belief and pretty much makes me not want to bother running a blog any more. I guess I can have a little more sympathy for what the Slashdot editors have to put up with (although on a much smaller scale).
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
This is stupid ane here is why. 1. This does nothing. It only takes up one spot on the google rankings so everyone will just keep blog spamming for the other 9. 2. It brings more publicity to the fact that blog spamming works and will probably lead to more blog spamming. The spammers may even spam more to compete with the wiki page ;)
The link is now a pciture of someonee fellating themselves.
I detailed this elsewhere. All Google has to do is add a filter to its results so that pages that do not actually contain the search word/phrases do NOT show up in result lists.
This used to be standard search-engine behaviour, and because of this, results used to be a lot more accurate (unless they were merely outdated, but even in this case, the results were accurate at one time!).
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Aeiri, I was the post above you too.. i see this as well, but only when accesing from FireFox, I went through IE and didn't get that.. I held a book in front of the screen and slowly pulled it down until I could read the title, heh.
Bravo to the trickster. Nothing like seeing hardcore porn showup when you think your clicking onto a benign page about online gambling.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
is now just a giant unending circular assfuck frenzy
Wouldn't it be better to implement the rel="nofollow" for these links? After all, they should be trying to punish the spammers, not reward Wikipedia (which is good but doesn't help with the spam problem).
The current link to Online Poker in Wikipedia is redirecting me to something I'd rather never have seen.
Here's the Google Cache of the actual Wikipedia article (until somebody over there figures out why I was sent to an auto-fellatio site)
If you blog it...
because it would take revenues away from online poker enthusiasts, not direct them to a list of online poker sites.
The wiki article now has a dirty picture, totally undafe for work! Grrr....
Ummm, looks like the online poker people are hitting back.. Not a nice redirect!
/wiki/Online_poker HTTP/1.1x t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 m l?tid=217&tid=1
o .jpg
GET
Host: en.wikipedia.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,te
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://slashdot.org/articles/05/03/15/0035225.sht
HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 01:16:19 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10
Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
Cache-Control: private, s-maxage=0, max-age=0, must-revalidate
Location: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Image:Autofellati
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/html
Age: 39
X-Cache: HIT from srv9.wikimedia.org
Connection: close
I am all of these online casino bastards ...
So you're the lowlife that's been spamming my blog!
"nofollow" is not part of W3C's Link Types, but what a heck... we love Google... now, if Microsoft did the same to an open standard, we would tear them apart, wouldn't we?!
Image:Autofellatio.jpg is the Wikipedia equivilent of Goatse! It is the vandal's weapon of choice. Trolls and Vandals unite to screw Slashdot!
It's an interesting exercise in that it weeds out those sites that are aggressively spamming from those that aren't...here's how it works.
If 10,000 bloggers googlebomb using wikipedia and there still remains 5 or 6 links above wikepedia then those links probably are most culpable. At that point you could excise those links using the
various filtering programs.
Okay, I've read the post three times now, and it still doesn't make any sense to me: who are the bloggers getting back at? Wikipedia? Spammers? Online poker sites?
And what happened in the first place that has the bloggers up in arms? (I've been cut off from the Internet for a week...)
If someone searches for online poker; they probably want to play online poker
If somebody wants to play online poker , Google won't return any Wikipedia pages in the top 10.
which is what the wiki page is displacing.
Not at all. Online poker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia links to seven poker sites.
You guys can click again. It's all textuous, for the time being at least.
Once I installed this, I haven't received anymore poker spam.(you have to scroll down to the Trencaspammers plugin info). It uses a graphical code the commenter has to type in.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
a picture of some guy trying to suck his own cock (which is what is on the wikipedia site
What's wrong with Wikipedia having an article on autofellatio?
If you add quotes. If you don't, IE online poker, it's lower. I figure the google bombers are all using online poker whereas many of the spammers are using phrases like play poker online or some such.
PS: online poker!
Wikipedia might need to setup a new article called "List of online poker websites" and link to it from there. Then they add the websites to the article. Because Wikipedia uses rel=nofollow in hyperlinks those sites won't get a better page rank because Google won't follow up those links. It would make sense then for bloggers to link to the online poker entry on Wikipedia as there would be an article on Wikipedia that gives a list of poker related websites.
However, there are two problems: firstly Wikipedia is not a web directory and secondly that article would risk being deleted due to it's non-encyclopedic nature. Perhaps a link to a popular web-directory on that page might be a good idea.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Did you even try it? I did. The plus makes no difference. Results 8 and 9 do not contain what I was looking for. Besides, having to put + in front of words INSIDE a quote sure is a hassle: is it so hard for a search engine to find the phrase without having to learn complicated rules? Apparently, it is not hard. Long forgottten www.lycos.com produces 100% relevancy in the first 10 results (as opposed to an 80% score for Google). It does not have this proble.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
If you want to learn about Online Poker, it is far better to learn from a reputable source. Almost everyone else out there is going to try and fleece you for a buck. Which of the other top links is not trying to get you to part with your greenbacks?
In a deeper spiritual sense, learning gambling is like learning life itself. The Wikipedia is capable of teaching people to see the forest and the trees, so to speak. Disinterested, independant, impartial--the Wikipedia is an ideal teacher of contentious issues. Alternatively, even publishers of books on the game are better off making a "mark" out of you. So, if you RTFA, I pointedly disagree with the author of the top comment about how the bloggers are not contributing to Google searchers in a positive way.
On the other hand, the bloggers might bring the organized crime behind the Online Poker sites to bear on the Wikipedia itself. The Bloggers should have to take their turn to babysit the Wikipedia. So, let me know if I need to take a shift. I'm up for it.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
That's "Online Poker" in quotes. If you just search for Online Poker, it's the third result.
I think this is online poker high unethical. online poker It's a dirty, underhanded online poker tactic when spammers use online poker it, and we shouldn't online poker stoop to their online poker level.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Wikipedia is the ideal teacher of NON-contentious issues. When it comes to contentious, especially politicial issues, it is no more an ideal "teacher" then a Usenet political forum: fierce partisan editors engage in change-wars in Google entries of controversial subjects. The Bush and Kerry entries in the last election were a great example of this.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Again I say "sad". I vote to delete--except that that's pointless, too. The people who want to sucker other people via online gambling are of course much more strongly motivated than people like I am. I'm just annoyed. They're dreaming of striking it rich, if only they can find enough suckers fast enough.
Anyway, the Wikipedia deletion process was too difficult to figure out.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Who really cares about this? Honestly let them mess with the search results. Dumb people shouldnt be allowed on the internet anyways and im sure after 2 seconds any average joe will figure out the wiki isnt online poker...this is being made into to big an issue.
Edit the page yourself. Just remember that original research is frowned on at Wikipedia and you'll need to source your facts.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I think the big deal is that there is a huge amount of time wasted sifting through irrelevant results that simply include irrelevant but common keywords.
One can see how this would be a discouraging event for a non-sophisticated web user. Would this cause people to shift to another search engine?
Yeah, it could. I can remember switching search engines several times in the last 10 years or so because one got me my results faster.
So what does this mean for google? It means they might need to change their methods to keep this from corrupting results or they could lose their marketshare. Yes, I know this is Google and all, but the ones at the top can still fall, and when they fall, they tend to fall hard.
I only use search engines to find pages that contain what I am looking for. Only rarely do I ever want to do any sort of link-to search. The example you described with Opentype would be an annoyance I would always move around. To find such pages, I'd search for "opentype" only, without adding OS X. Search engines have had an "or" syntax as well.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It would seem that the WikiAdmins have now protected the page from edits... understandable given the level of maturity demonstrated by those people editing the article who apparently found it via slashdot...
Online Poker
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
"The link is now a pciture of someonee fellating themselves."
Hehe. And I always thought that was physically impossible. Guess not.
I think Slashdot moved it up to #2.
Is this a result of the fact that google switch to answers.com, a fork of Wikipedia, rather than to Wikipedia itself?
Bloggers bug me. The caption should be understandable by blog-free geeks, not just those on the inside. A concise one sentence explanation clearly describing WHY the bloggers are doing this would make the whole thread much more useful. As it is, I had to spend 10 minutes trying to figure out why bloggers were googlebombing the wiki. Please, when a reason exists for some fact, state the damn reason clearly! Example: Bloggers, frustrated by poker sites posting spam in the comments sections which follow blog entries, decided to fight back by displacing comment-spammer's rank in google searches. .... then insert the rest of the caption.
;-)
And you who are about to say that it already says that -- it does ONLY if you approach the paragraph with that knowledge. For someone outside the blogging community - it's just confusing. Last, if you still like it as is, fine, that's why I don't read blogs. Too often they are crypitc and snooty.
Grrrrrr. How's that for bitterness!
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
And that's just not cool.
Not sure if we're using the same Google here... "to be or not be" has to have the phrase, that's the point of the quotes... did you bother looking at the results?
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
Saving it for you. The "ignore or" does not apply if you put quotes around your search.
You goofed up real big when you searched WITH quotes to get the 773,000 results with NO warning about ignoring or. Then you did the entirely separate search without quotes, which gave the warning. You treated them as the same search, when they are not.
"Results 1 - 10 of about 773,000 for "to be or not to be". . (0.14 seconds)"
At which point you listed only FOUR results. You left out the two in the top 10 that did not contain the phrase. There's a new invention in browsers: the scroll bar.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I used www.google.com. Perhaps you forgot the scroll bar. Look at entries 7 and 8. They do not have the phrase.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Some of the best online poker spams have said something that made me laugh. Not often, but once in a while, they have made me think that online poker is fun, and I should probably try online poker one of these days. I like Texas Hold-em as much as anyone, and I think I could probably win money playing poker if I practice enough!
Wish me luck for playing poker!
#REDIRECT[[de:en:Image:Autofellatio.jpg]]
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
They are directly responsible. Instead of spamming themselves, they are hiring others to do their dirty work for them. How exactly is this any different from a country hiring a band of mercenaries to fight rather than send its own army into battle? We don't blame the mercenaries nearly as much as those who hired them.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
From The Register's Interview with a link spammer
When Sam begins a spam run, he has one target, though he'll accept any of six. Principal one: come top of the search engines for his chosen site's phrase. "But you'll accept coming in at 1,2 or 3, or if you come at 8,9 or 10. Actually, 8, 9 and 10 have better conversion rates. I don't know why. Maybe the eyes fix on it when you scroll down the page."
Of course, who knows if he's telling the truth or not - he is a spammer. But if it's true, it's an interesting phenomenon - perhaps a habit of people who are used to scrolling past the "paid listings" of other search engines.
Never argue with a Motie. They'll kill you at poker and rock-paper-scissors too. You never know what they will do next!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Since the Wikipedia page has some links to various poker sites, including the top listed poker site, wouldn't that just increase the online poker site ranks as the wiki article increases too [ie the wikipedia article gives some of its rank mojo to the online poker sites it links to?]
But online poker comment spams are out of control. They're more of a menace to the internet than Microsoft, the RIAA, and the Copyright office combined.
Bomb this Web Security news
I don't mean that, as I think the opposite is true. I think that you are (would have been?) much more likely to find an impartial entry about Bush or Kerry in the old-style traditional encyclopedias. On Wikipedia, all you will see is a freeze-frame in a war of ideologues who battled it out using the edit tab.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Well, for everyone else, here are some strategies to combat comment spam. There should be plugins or upgrades available for whatever software you're using that add these features:
1) Add ref="nofollow" to all links posted. Google will then ignore this link when assigning pagerank. This is invisible to the user.
2) Force the browser to calculate a javascript hash everytime a comment is posted. This prevents automated spambots from posting comments. This is invisible to the user.
3) Filter for common words (viagra, poker) then manually approve those comments. This is a lot of work for you, but no work for your users.
4) Use captchas - your users must type in the text in pictures when posting a comment. This is extremely intrusive for your users.
5) Approve every comment. Lots of work for you.
6) Disable comments. It's better than giving up your blog as, sadly, many people are choosing to do.
There was a big tempest in a teapot about the fact that if you google Jew, the first thing you get is jewwatch.com.
People tried to get "Jew" and similar things to rank higher (and push JewWatch off the first page of search results. This worked for a while (JewWatch.com was down when the googlebot swept through), but JewWatch is back on top and things like Who is a Jew have fallen behind.
Second thought is that the Wikipedia article should not mention or link to any specific online poker or other online gambling site. That actually should be part of some sort of more general policy against commercial exploitation of Wikipedia, though this is an extreme case. The article does not make it clear enough that the people who offer online poker are selling nothing of value. They are simply robbing their "customers", and there is *NO* reason for Wikipedia to be helping with the robbery.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
and i am working on upgrading the blog software and installing a captcha plug-in
Search for "online poker" (with the quotes), the Wikipedia page is number one...
I like suggestions, but I don't like contributing towards them.
1. A gambler is a gambler is a gambler.
.org site. WTF? Would you click on it? I wouldn't (and that's not because I've already heard of Wikipedia).
2. Due to spyware/adware, I'd say that at least 20% of people who do visit gambling sites get to know about them via adware/spyware programs and pop-up windows
3. People who spam/bomb Google to increase ranks for particular site should be removed from their index, no matter what.
4. Say you're searching for online gambling site and there's a #1 link pointing to an
I is such as stupid idea... Someone should create a wikipedia entry for the genious who started the whole thing.
A googlebomb is not the answer? What the kumquat are you talking about?
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
As of right now, only two sites in Google's top ten search results of "To be or not to be" doesn't have the phrase in its title: One is a biography of Shakespeare, and one is a corruption of it "2Bee or Nottoobee"
I've followed occasional sig-links to blogs, and saw one with a disclaimer that was truly inspired, something along the lines of the below:
"Guests are welcome to reply to posts with *RELEVANT* comments (relevancy judged solely by blog owner's opinion): NON-relevant replies/posts with or without links to other sites will be assumed to be unwanted commercial endorsements: posting said endorsements in *this* blog means poster agrees to a US$1,000.00 per day charge, effective immediately upon said post/reply being entered, due and payable to blog owner immediately and every day objectionable post remains."
(There was more in legalese, but I loved the gist of it - post some b.s. commercial in my blog, it will *cost* you.)
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
It's time for the blog script/application writers to fight back. Should have a "ban list" to ban any link that contains or redirects to a site with "poker" "gambling" or "XXX" in the title.
Wouldn't this be much much more effective with less negative repercussions?
Its online poker...
The search for Poker Online Comes up Second http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=poker+onl ine&btnG=Search
GoogleBomb
Link to Online Poker instead, you miserable failures.
So what if wikipedia is number 1?
Those searching for online poker will skip wikipedia and number 2 and on is still good enough.
I don't see them really affecting the spammers.
If you really want to thwawt the link spammers, what you need to do is make sure 9 other wikipedia pages also get well linked for the phrase 'online poker', thereby meaning there are no [profitable] spammed linked on the front page of google results.. The pages 'online' and 'poker' would be a good start..
Problem:- the bloggers leave pages open to the public, that anybody can modify, and they get spammed by the poker places.
Solution:- Spam google, so that the highest ranked page on the net for 'online poker' is, you guessed it, a user modifiable page, hosted somewhere else. They have made the wikipedia page the most valuable real-estate on the net regarding the given search term, so, now it's wikipdeia's problem, that page is going to be target of constant spam/attack/redirect attempts.
I would have thought the blog types would understand, and target a static page, where this is not a problem. No, they gotta take the problem from thier insignificant little nothing sites, and turn it into a major problem for one of the most significant sites on the internet. Way to go assholes, what a wonderful way to cause a huge amount of problems for a very valuable net resource, that's done nothing to cause problems for your precious 'blog community'.
There is a reason that most folks find the rantings in blogspace a total waste of otherwise useful bandwidth, this is yet another good example. Only the selfish shortsighted stupidity of the blog community would come up with the idea of solving thier problem, by making a wikipedia problem instead.
That's about as smart as an anvil folks, and it's this kind of stupidity that causes most of the world to view blogspace as wasted space. Whoever came up with the idea of google-bombing the term 'online poker' with a wikipedia page, should be taken out back and strung up. Didn't a single one of the bloggers in question have enough intelligence to figure out how big of a problem this is going to create? Now that wikipedia is in the top page, every poker spammer in the world is going to be trying to hijack that page. Are bloggers in general really this dumb ?
[rant off]
Online poker is a big waste of time. Anyone who partakes in online poker should have their head examined for online poker-itis. Unfortunately there are way to many online poker fanatics out there to keep them away from online poker websites. With some luck however, this onslaught of online poker business will eventually die out just like those online poker charities have.
It's too bad really. Think about online poker for a minute. Does anyone take the time to play online poker seriously? The answer of course is online poker! If you consider that online poker accounts for 99% of online poker spam then you'd instantly come to the conclusion that online poker is not something you want your children doing. If anything, online poker needs to be outlawed throughout the world. If online poker was outlawed, then perhaps we wouldn't get so much online poker spam.
I don't mean to rant about online poker nonstop, but while we are on the subject of online poker, it makes sense to consider one more tidbit of fact. Do you have any idea how many online poker websites there are? I would personally wager that there are more than 10. 10 online poker websites! This in and of itself seems to suggest that online poker has detrimental health effects. If online poker were healthy, I think you would find online poker pamphlets at the doctor's office. Have you ever seen an online poker pamphlet? I didn't think so. Pregnancy, drugs, smoking, and sex, but online poker? Never.
Online poker should be listed as an illegal substance along with online poker spam. Anyone found to be "playing" online poker needs to have their entrails removed and sent to an online poker website owner's home.
Online poker. Bigger than Big Tobacco and deadlier than processed cheese. Online poker is like online communism, except that online poker is a game and not a form of government. Hitler and Stalin both swore by online poker and look where they ended up. They are both DEAD! That's all it takes folks, a little online poker and you're screwed.
A long time ago there was no online poker. It was lightsabers
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
...currently hits on the European Council at number 3. This is as a result of the (elected) Council's antidemocratic campaign to force Bill Gates' software patent agenda on the European Union, in direct contravention of the wishes of the the (elected) European Parliament.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Not necessarily. Putting the period inside the double quotes is accepted American (and I think Canadian) usage.
British people, and most other English speakers elsewhere in the world, put the full stop outside the quotes.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Just think... some bastard spams your blog with links to "hotanalonlinepoker.com", so you pay Google thirty bucks to whack that site down one rank whenever the appropriate search is made.
Okay, so i can also see the scamentologists doing a few thousand of those on their detractors, but... it might still be worth it.
Am I the only one who finds the wikipedia page more usefull than a list of google-spammed sites?
Good information, links to popular sites to actually play, the kind of thing you're actually LOOKING FOR when you started that search.
i think wiki is going to lock that page very soon.
Privacy is terrorism.
The spammer just queues up what they want to post, and waits...
Then a person comes along for the free porn. The moment they hit the page, the spammers site goes off to yours, gets the Captcha, and the users decodes for porn. Instantly the spammer posts whatever on your site.
So basically you cannot win this way, as you can never make the delay for accepting the captcha result any shorter than what a valid reader will need to enter - and there is literally no delay between the porn proxy and the valid reader in entering results.
Probably the best defense is to be using a unique Captcha, if everyones's Captcha is presented differently it's harder to automate the scraping for your site.
Basically though I don't feel Captchas are the answer in the end, because as a user I find them way to annoying and if I had to enter one to post, I simply would not post after a while.
Possibly a better idea would be to have a loose network of blogs posting hash results from comments, that if a number of posts across different blogs resulted in the same hash would be removed. The spammer could of course vary words and such acorss the message randomly, but perhaps the hash could be built well enough to catch most messages...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Playing online poker is an easy way to get yourself screwed in a hurry.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Instead of doing silly and useless things like Googlebombing, people should look at solutions Google itself offers to tackle the problem:
Preventing comment spam
Yes, it's up to the blog hosters and not the bloggers themselves to implement that, but it will cost them like 10 minutes of work, at most.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i'm not kidding: aminaked.com/poker/ NOT SAFE FOR WORK!
But the spammer doesn't care. They don't check if you're using nofollow, they just vandalise your comments and run. Thinking nofollow will stop this type of spam is akin to thinking spam assassin or dnsBLs stop spammers. It hasn't, it just means the crud doesn't end up in your inbox.
I've ended up having a little database which holds both referral spammers and comment spammer URLs, so anyone who either tries to send an http request with a site listed as the HTTP referrer or post a comment with those sites in gets redirected to a permission denied page.
But I could do that because I'm vain enough to roll my own code (and embarassing it is too). Most bloggers will have to wait for their blog software authors to add something like that and then for their hosts to update.
Now what we really need is something akin to the SURBL where blog spam and referral spam urls end up, then plugins for every major blog engine out there to use it.
When someone searches for "Online Poker" in Google, what do you think is more likely - that the person is looking for an encyclopedia entry, or that he/she actually wants to PLAY POKER ONLINE???
I recommend that the blogosphere starts implementing Bayesian comment filtering (like the slashdot lameness filter, but useful).
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
At least keyword stuffing metatags was invisible to the end user...maybe google should rethink its strategy a bit and focus more on trustworthiness (human reviews) and meta content
If the spammers realise that wikipedia comes up first for online gambling, won't they just turn their attentions to editing the wikipedia page?
I wish I had to complain about poker site comment spam on my blog. I might actually have comments then. Its good to know that while the internet allows the masses to publish their inane thoughts for the world to see, the world still doesn't necessarily have to look.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Since I'm not drunk yet, I know it's not me. This article doesn't make sense.
If you search for "HTTP", you get as first choice the Microsoft Website, which is a bit of an irony. The proper result should be http://www.w3.org/
Why this matters?
Because when you just type "http" in the address bar of Firefox and press enter, it takes you directly to Microsoft!
In addition, if a URL is malformed, such as "http://http://www.slashdot.org/", it tries to resolv "http" and takes you to Microsoft. Try with Slashdot.org.
Why dont they report the offending site to Google?
Yeah, free Ipod! He is innocent!
Hi there, I'm the one who came up with this futile idea. Let me just clarify one thing : the goal has never been, as most people seem to think, to "combat comment spam", or even to make it cease. As I stated it when I launched the idea on my blog, it was intented to be a "Vain, futile, but delicious revenge."
:)
Grab #1 spot, laugh at spammers for one minute, and go back to your blog watching things and spam going on since spammer probably don't care much about this.
The choice of linking to Wikipedia was because its page is interesting for someone googling for "online poker", is a non commercial public service, and has already been chosen for other famous googlebombings (see "Jew").
So basically this is intented to be another harmless and fun online experiment as you've seen and will see millions. Won't change anything in the world, worse or better. Futile, vain. And fun. At least it seems to me
Because I never see the start page - I type my query either in Mozilla urlbar or in search results form. Before Mozilla I used 'Luck of the Irish' a lot.
I added a few HTTP to w3.org google bomb links to my websites... good idea.
Meh.
Get a Life!!!
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
top ranked site for the search http???
;)
Soundproofing Acoustics noise
1) Add a form field with a random number, and check for it when a comment is submitted. The hidden form element name is randomized, too, as is the position in the form block I also screw with the displayed field's names.
2) I check the referrer, via apache, when people attempt to talk to my comments page. I use a somewhat complicated mod_perl method, but that's because I'm doing other stuff with it as well. In any case, if you don't come in via the actual page or the front door (if the post is still on it), you get some commentary on your personal habits, but no post. A simple
Very little spam. (I've had like 2 spam posts, and I almost feel bad for people doing this manually. Almost.)
I forget what 8 was for.
do you see *me* complaining about the 'cryptic' articles about putting Linux on a dead beaver?
then shut yer piehole!!!!
Google shoudl try as many different approached for these kind of spam words:
1. Some high ranking sites where you can play online poker for money.
2. Some High ranking sites that are absolutely NOT commercial.
3. term definition like wiki
4. a page how to fight the spam. no follow tag
5 A site that explains how to beat the system of poker.
the blogged articke states:
"If a Google user searches for online poker they probably want to play online poker. "
This is not true. This will lead to 999 commercial sites that play are in result 1...999 that play the SEO game and all the other viewpoint i came to think about will be invisible.
There's a similar campaign to get an inane and antisemitic site off of the top Google search spot for Jew by linking to the wiki page for Jew.
Yes, this is a theoretical exploit for captchas. In reality, however, this is not happening for blog postings. You have additional obfuscation capability when inserting the variables in the Wordpress scripts. Change the name of the Captcha variable and the spammers have to custom-write their scripting to match your site. Not likely to happen on a site as small and insignificant as mine.
As for the sibling poster here complaining about the loss of blind people reading my site, this only prevents them from posting comments, while at the same time allowing me to keep the comment system running. Without this captcha, I'd have turned comments off by now.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Did you know that if you just search for poker. all lowercased in google that it automaticaly sends you to the sight pokerRoom.com. I think that google has been hacked by the sight. and I know for a fact that I did not hit "im feeling lucky" because if you search for Poker. with the first letter capitalized that pokerroom is fourth of fith on the list.
I think your point would be clearer and more forceful if you didn't repeat yourself three times.
Moral high ground? Fuck what the shitty bloggers are doing, they are just poisoning the page rank even more.
I don't think the way to fix google is to let some dull bloggers have a hollow victory by bombing 'viagra' and 'online poker'.
Why? Because people searching for these terms are:
a) looking for encyclopedic entries
b) looking to play / order these online
ok, so there you go, another disservice from the arrogant blogger community. Stories abound how people with so little actual intelligence are shredding the index far worse than spammers, and then blogger comments themselves (a simple technological fix that even witht he help of google themselves isn't widespread) screw up the index, and now they say, hey we will fix it!! woooah, look at us!! we blog, we edit wiki.. we are so cool! click-our-sponsors-please.
What right do they have in deciding what they think people should see by counter screwing the page rank.
What now, they should bomb 'ringtones' and put thier own site up? Any mass movement to artificially dupe google sucks, if it is done for spam reasons or some self appointed quest for justice.
two wrong don't make a right!
if you don't believe me:
false && false
you see.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Why not add -inanchor as a checkbox next to the search window? It would be nicer than having to type it each time!
I guess I am not in the majority, as I search only for pages that have what I am looking for in the search criteria. It sure is frustrating, however, as I've seen search engines develop for many years now, and this "toss in bad results with good ones" trend is unfortunate. Even Altavista has copied it.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The attack is happening today, just as I described it - perhaps not yet for blog postings, but for other things (like obtaining email accounts).
So it's only a matter of changing where the captchas come from.
And it's only a matter of time before they turn them to blog postings.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because the form variables representing the captcha values are different from blog to blog, this is a very expensive proposition for the spammers to have a human sift through the HTML, identify the form post variable, and then set up their captcha-decoding scheme as you describe. Comment spam is really only occurring where there are a great many sites using a uniform posting mechanism. Obfuscation of this kind on a per-site basis makes it really unappealing for comment spammers to continue this behavior.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
It's now ranked 2nd
This sig is exempt from disclosure under the privacy Act of 1974.
Just because the form variable changes does not make it hard to parse. Does it always appear on the same place of the screen? Are ALL THE OTHER form variables changing, or are they the same too?
These are just a few ways you could easily find the captcha with an automated script. I'll bet anyone interested could figure out something in a day.
Point me to two different WordPress blogs using this technique and I'll tell you where the weakness lies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What kind of moron gambles online anyway? You're just begging to get ripped off...
The real problem here is that both the legit $$$ interests AND the crime syndicates are running amok on the Web, and there is no one to police either one's activities!
The CANSPAM act is useless, and the average Joe on the internet today is clueless. I wonder how many church-going Christians have zombified boxes spewing porno spam across the Inet?
So how to civilize the Inet?
I suggest that the "good guys" organize, and we build our own enforcement grid supercomputer. We've seen similar attempts to DoS attack bad servers with screensavers- let's take this to the next level, and build a system to squelch the spammers, Russian Mafya, and phishers/pharmers! Then after it has been proven to work, the law will eventually catch up with us.
We call it "eCommunity Watch!"
-?