Some of us do not mind when some small business sends us an offer. The issue is really the people who get paid to submit and send crap-tastic submissions over and over.

I do not get upset, but rather feel sad for the people doing it and know it will make quite a few people upset.

Not to mention what if some of those ads are seen by children. Laws are being broken with form spamming. Just not always in the way we think. Hence why people keep doing it, but we should not tolerate it.

Sales is a numbers game, but not at the expense of others. Just not a completely ethical or legal thing to do. Even criminals have a breaking point when it comes to the public.

If we do not try and prevent others from abusing these types of communication channels and set standards it will eventually get out of hand. Look at your phone. We all are starting to get TXT messages from scams. Look at the pirates taking ships hostage. It starts with preventing in order to put the heat or smack down on the offenders, before it gets out of hand.

People will do what they want, but it is not the job or duty of the recipient to keep honest people honest. The world could use a bit more “self responsibility”. <– Note this is really what I am saying.

Let's all be more responsible. More so for the people doing the unethical marketing techniques. One person causing grief to thousands of other people . . . just does not seem right. One thousand wrongs may make 5 sales, but does not make 5 rights.

I placed a Captcha on all of my sites. However, the errors still go to my errors email address and it is not "cool" nor seems productive to get the "crap-tastic" offers. Some of it is just plain bad marketing.

If as a whole we spent more time using our communication techniques affectively. We might spend less time on the "less productive" marketing and more time to affectively deliver the bottom line.

Just saying I vote YES that "link spamming simply isn’t acceptable".

Are you saying we shouldn’t bother getting polio vaccinations either because they take time and money?

The fact that something can be prevented means we should all be able to prevent it. Maybe it’s a logistics problem in that not enough people have access to the information and technology (like condoms or drugs in Africa) but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying.

I agree 100% that they can cause havok. I’ve recently had somebody manually spam one of my websites to the tune of 1000 posts per day. I actually logged their IP filling out captchas and jumping through any real-time code change hoops I implemented. They were just bored and stupid. So I agree that even the best defenses can’t prevent ALL spam. But you CAN prevent a LOT of it.

I’ve link spammed in the past (never for any legit sites that I actively market) but merely just to test the results.

It freaking works – it works nicely. It works so nicely that all I have to do is type in my affiliate link to a porn site, click a button, and collect my check. As long as it’s that easy, nothing will make spammers think twice. It’s too profitable.

That’s part of the issue there. Recent Google devaluing and nofollow defaults by some of the common software have indeed gone a long way, but they’ll never truly defeat it.

There’s still forum signature, twitter, youtube comments, myspace bulletins, and many other places to spam that people actually click on (which can be way more valuable than trying to game Google)

As long as it’s profitable, people will keep doing it. There’s only 2 realistic solutions. 1.) do what you can to prevent it, and 2.) change the system so that the technique doesn’t work.

#2 doesn’t seem to be practical.

I guess all I’m saying is that in this day and age, it’s naive and careless to launch a site without spam prevention.

But no, the responsibility does not solely lay with the webmaster. I think the overall web community should be pushing harder to change attitudes far and wide that link spamming simply isn’t acceptable.

This type of post is simply an apology for bad behavior. You’re providing excuses for link spamming — exactly as I wrote, that’s not going to wash with me. Sorry.

Look, I oversee a completely separate site with far more deterrents in place than the things you suggest above. Like I said in the post, I’m not naive. And that site still has to deal with spam.

So, a smart webmaster needs to be prepared to deal with spam, absolutely. And they aren’t going to get sympathy if they’re slammed and had no defenses, agreed. And I wasn’t posting looking for that sympathy. I was posting to highlight another story about the havoc link spammers can cause, in hopes that maybe a few of them (or their friends) will think twice in the future.