On 22/05/13 19:07, halz wrote:
Do you think we should try to contact them and explain that they are behaving badly? Maybe on these forums. Maybe we'd have to spam them back repeatedly with such messages as they get removed by the admins.
I don't think that would be effective.
And on youtube do you think we can get videos like this removed?
Feel free to try.
We can at least comment on them and vote them down (Youtube finds quite a lot of similar videos) How about unleashing a bit of "ethical hacking" e.g. DDOS attacks on people distributing this software?
You can go to jail for that, in a lot of places. Even if they DDoS'd you first, and you DDoS'd them back, you'd be more likely to go to jail than them, because being an amateur, you'd be more likely to slip up in some traceable way.
I think the only effective way to deal with wiki spam would be to reduce the profit margin. That means either making it more expensive, say with technical anti-spam tools, or making the revenue smaller, by getting their sites delisted from Google, and by finding legal ways to reduce direct revenue sources like pay-per-click search engine affiliate schemes.
From the experience with email spam, we can expect that if some
organisation became successful in this goal of reducing the effectiveness of wiki and blog spam, that organisation would come under attack, by DDoS and other means. So it's not a task for the faint-hearted.
-- Tim Starling