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It is remarkable the ingenuity of man that he is able to usurp a simple guestbook facility to such nefarious ends.

On my travels along the misinformation superadway (t'internet as it has now become) I have encountered a group of ne'er-do-wells whose sole aim is to amass as much money as they possibly can as quickly as possible in the easiest manner possible. Well what's wrong with that , it is The American Way and we would all like to be able to do this. However I am sure that most of us would agree that we would prefer this to be done legitimately without infringing upon the rights, property and resources of others.

It seems a simple thing that has apparently little impact or damage to the "victims", in fact it seems to be a victimless crime. I have read the perpetrators of this type of activity justifying their behaviour that we asked for it because we added a facility to our sites that enabled them to do their thing.

Large amounts of money can be made if your e-commerce site can achieve a top search engine ranking. Search Engine specialists realised that an important criterion was the number of diferent sites containing links to the particular e-commerce website in question, thus was invented the link-swapping scam. Certain unscrupulous individuals further realised that they could skew the rankings even further if they could automatically add these links to any number of websites on demand. This where the comments pages came into the equation.

I checked my comments database and discovered some remarkaable facts. Many of the entries came from the same or similar email addresses (.g bob@email.com, sam@email.com) and had the same URL which always seemed to be a site selling some sort of viagra, gambling , fetich sex or other consumer goods. Most of the entries were simple comments like "great site" and "keep up the good work" and only used the email and URL fields for this linking information. However some people were obviously not satisfied with this minimal hijack and packed the comments field with a list of URLS advertising a variety goods and services. Out of 3000 comments less than 10% were genuine, the rest were automated adware content.

Even though I removed the comments section from my updated site comments were still being added.

You might ask what harm has been done and the asnswer is as follows

1. I get a maximum monthly bandwidth allocation per month which I pay for and this is being used illegitimately , preventing genuine users from accessing my material. The most visited page is the add comment page.
2. Disk usage that I am paying for is being used without my knowledge for purposes that I do not sanction
3. Goods and services that I do not promote or support in any way are being associated with my website
4. The comments which should have been used to improve the site have been drowned out by the plethora of site ads and thus subverted its utility to the point that it cannot be used.
5. The search engine rankings are being fraudulently manipulated to the detriment of legitimate business.
6. The very nature of the internet as a medium for the exchange of information is under threat as the majority of traffic becomes tainted by false and misleading information. Search engines are used to find relevant information nd if these are subverted then none of the information returned can be trusted.

Thus I am completely removing this comments facility.

If I add a facility like this in the future I will write my own that will prevent this sort of abuse.

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