Post by EXO on Jan 6, 2009 12:32:40 GMT 8
A few months back, we had started to suffer a plague of spam postings. On one occasion, two spam postings were added to every thread on the site. The guests had different names, bogus of course. Martyn Keen was a great assistance in clearing this up - we had to go into every post and kill the spam individually.
What the spam attacks had in common was their source - a series of computer servers deep in China - notably including the web-servers of the Development & Research Center of State Council Net, Beijing, China.
My first reaction was anger - I charged the Chinese Government, which goes to the extent of controlling the expression of dissident political concepts, with allowing cyber-criminals to train, take root and flourish. "Like lead in their paint, and melamine in their milk, they flood us with cyber trash."
A bit harsh? Well, not at all if you have to clear regular postings of thousands of links in Chinese text.
Upon further thought, I decided to attempt to use their own censorship in our favor - one of the things we did was to "call out" the Chinese Government to add us to their list of websites which are prohibited from being viewed inside their country.
I did a number of searches to see if anyone else had done it as a means of dealing with cyber-trash postings. Didn't find any examples.
We placed some articles containing numerous links to the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989. The logic was that Big Brother's censors would spot them, and then prohibit access to our site.
Earlier today I came across the name of a Chinese equivalent to Google's search engine (I won't mention the name) and did a number of searches using it.
Nope, nothing. Nothing about us under any of the keywords.
Considering our generally high rankings in the normal search engine of most users (Google), this indicates the probability that we are now officially invisible in China.
Anyone who feels that we should take steps to ensure that the Chinese internet population should have access to this site can also volunteer as "spam consultant" for dealing with Chinese spam on the bulletin board.
Unfortunately, we'll still have to put up with the "only guests can reply" policy.
What the spam attacks had in common was their source - a series of computer servers deep in China - notably including the web-servers of the Development & Research Center of State Council Net, Beijing, China.
My first reaction was anger - I charged the Chinese Government, which goes to the extent of controlling the expression of dissident political concepts, with allowing cyber-criminals to train, take root and flourish. "Like lead in their paint, and melamine in their milk, they flood us with cyber trash."
A bit harsh? Well, not at all if you have to clear regular postings of thousands of links in Chinese text.
Upon further thought, I decided to attempt to use their own censorship in our favor - one of the things we did was to "call out" the Chinese Government to add us to their list of websites which are prohibited from being viewed inside their country.
I did a number of searches to see if anyone else had done it as a means of dealing with cyber-trash postings. Didn't find any examples.
We placed some articles containing numerous links to the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989. The logic was that Big Brother's censors would spot them, and then prohibit access to our site.
Earlier today I came across the name of a Chinese equivalent to Google's search engine (I won't mention the name) and did a number of searches using it.
Nope, nothing. Nothing about us under any of the keywords.
Considering our generally high rankings in the normal search engine of most users (Google), this indicates the probability that we are now officially invisible in China.
Anyone who feels that we should take steps to ensure that the Chinese internet population should have access to this site can also volunteer as "spam consultant" for dealing with Chinese spam on the bulletin board.
Unfortunately, we'll still have to put up with the "only guests can reply" policy.