Sins of The Internet: Webring Spammer
I must admit that I am a webring junkie. A webring is a concept invented in 1994 by Denis Howe (EUROPA) and perfected in 1995 by Sage Weil (webring.org). What they envisioned was the concept of a long string of sites joined together in a sort of ring. In EUROPA, the ring consists of sites with a simple hyperlink to the next site in the list. Sage took this concept much further with Webring by creating the concept of a fragment with special controls to allow forward and backwards motion in the ring. These are called rings, by the way, because if you click long enough along the ring you come back to where you started.
Yahoo destroyed Webring in September 2000 (an event known by many ringmasters as Black Tuesday), but have no fear, the torch got passed to two different systems: a self-hosted version called Ringlink and a very nice remotely hosted system called RingSurf. There are also some other webring systems which work equally well but are not as popular.
Okay, where was I? Oh yes, I am a webring junkie. I love to join webrings. My site is a member of well over 250 of these paths through the vast wilderness of the internet, and I run about a dozen of them myself. Two of my webrings are hosted at RingSurf and the rest I privately run on my own Ringlink system. I do this because I think it's enjoyable to create little paths through the wilds of the internet. It's not for traffic, because the amount of hits generated by webrings are actually fairly small.
Anyway, when you want to join a webring you enter information in a form and you install the ring fragment on your page. The ringmaster gets notified and ensures that the site meets the criteria of the ring, then adds it so surfers can visit the new site.
Recently I received two additions to my RingSurf webrings, one for each ring. They were both from the same email address. I visited the sites and did indeed find the fragments. However, I also found that these sites were banner farms. In fact, these pages contained perhaps the largest number of banners of all sizes that I have ever seen on a single page. I counted well over 200 banners on each page before I gave up in a mixture of disgust and awe!
It was also obvious that the pages had nothing to do with the subject of the ring. You see, webrings all have themes, and all of the sites in the ring should add to the basic topic. For example, a Star Trek webring should only contain Star Trek related sites.
I am a member of numerous egroups and elists about the subject of webrings, and I soon started receiving emails from many other ringmasters commenting that they had noticed exactly the same thing. In fact, as it turned out, the same person had joined over a thousand rings in one weekend! It was obviously done with the aid of some automation, and was obviously intended to funnel large amounts of traffic to his banner pages. I assume that he was trying to generate some money from clicks to his banners.
This was a clear case of webring spam. It is actually fairly common, especially in the new, simplistic Yahoo! webring system. However, the magnitude and scope of this spamming attempt put all others to shame.
The story has a happy ending. The people at RingSurf responded quickly to the ringmaster complaints and blocked the guy from joining any more webrings. The following notice was posted on the RingSurf website.
"It has come to our attention that a serious case of SPAM submissions to a number of RingSurf rings has occurred over the course of the weekend. Please check your Ring Queue and see if you have a new submission from any site using the email addresses of og1111@hotmail.com or v@paid1.com, or a url starting with http://www.paysurflist.com. This low-life spammer has submitted his site (a junk page of nothing but Commission-Junction affiliate links) to many rings in the system. If you see one of these submission in your Queue, simply delete it."
They also sent a complaint to Commission Junction, which was where his banners were from. The end result? The guy could no longer join any RingSurf ring, and most likely he Commission Junction account was canceled. He did a whole lot of work for nothing - except to annoy a whole lot of ringmasters.
The guy actually had the gall to send an email to RingSurf and complain. He apparently could not understand what he was doing wrong! Needless to say, he was not allowed back into RingSurf again.
Themestream Comments
Very good article, Richard. I just hope it's a one time thing. I'd hate to think that the spammers have discovered a whole new way to frustrate people. - P Reist
Thanks, Richard. Verrrry interesting. - Beth Austin