A friend of mine manages a popular music community site. We were talking about spam on community sites – and what happens if/when you become parasite host du jour.
He promised to share a cracker of an email he’d received from a disgruntled spammer when his splog got nuked. It’s too good not to share:
(Identifiable details have been redacted, natch).
From: < *********@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 3:44 PM
Subject: [I want to do business with you] Why take it down?I joined your site, and made a profile and a blog. I got my ********.co.uk blog entry ranked #1 for the search term “size 42 blue shoe widgets” and somebody at ********.co.uk took down my blog AND my profile page.
Why do this? To “fight spam,” right? Listen to me and listen closely.
I am driving FREE TRAFFIC to your silly little site & you TURN IT AWAY? Really.
Traffic that – who knows? – maybe will end up STAYING ON YOUR STUPID SITE for awhile & heck, maybe even BUY SOMETHING. From YOU. Or from one of your.. hmmmm.. ADVERTISERS?
Perhaps I should contact all your advertisers and inform them that somebody at your firm is actively TURNING AWAY POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS of their products.
Yes. Yes indeed. That is PRECISELY what I shall do.
Good day.
Oh by the way, if you want to put my profile & blog back up, you can find the url simply by typing into google.co.uk the following. (If you type it in quotes, your crappy site’s #1; without quotes it’s #2.):
“size 42 blue shoe widgets”
What a charmer, eh?
What the hell are show widgets?
March 12th, 2010 at 1:39 pm
A searchy-pseudonym to protect this idiot’s identity, I imagine.
March 17th, 2010 at 11:19 am
Exactly: a five word non-competitive search phrase.
March 17th, 2010 at 11:49 am
If this guy is going to talk to advertisers, then why not say who he is? Extorsion should not be allowed.
March 26th, 2010 at 9:21 am
This is so funny, good capture of how things really work, I agree he should say who he is.
July 26th, 2010 at 12:01 pm