

Strange new spam attack on News.YC - pg

We've had a rash of spam submissions in the last 24 hours.  All the sites have links to something called Entrecard (http://entrecard.com).  Looks like some strange combination of MLM and SEO.  Anyone have any idea what's going on?  Was it just that someone mentioned this site as a good place to spam on their forums, or is there some central organization controlling this?<p>In any case, for now we're killing any site that has any reference to Entrecard on it, even if it's conceivably on topic.
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Saphrym
I'm a moderator for Entrecard. It's not a spam site and people do not get
credits for others signing up with a referral link.It's a good service.

One of our members made the mistake of posting a link to here on our forums as
a place to submit blog articles. I've removed the post, so you shouldn't get
anymore submissions linking from Entrecard. Sorry for any inconvenience this
may have caused.

~~~
rms
<http://entrecard.com/forums/7/5341>

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Saphrym
Hmmm. It's not clickable from the forums themselves. Must be a bug. I'm
talking to the coder about it now.

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andr
Funny, entrecard is one of the companies presenting at the Cambridge Web
Innovators Group (<http://webinno17.eventbrite.com/>) next week. I'm no longer
sure if it was a bad thing that we couldn't get a spot to present there.

~~~
rms
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with Entrecard, it's just that
referral marketing of any kind attracts the lowest type of people trying to
make money on the internet.

It's actually pretty clever. <http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php> for anyone
curious to read about how it works.

Also some mashable coverage: <http://mashable.com/2008/03/28/entrecard/>

~~~
andr
Erm, if I spam 300 blogs a day by "dropping my card" for 3 days in a row, I
can buy a Penguin book.

<http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=earning_credits>

<http://entrecard.com/shop/category/10/>

~~~
rms
We are definitely not the target audience for this site. A lot of internet
marketers are from developing countries or kids.

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jsjenkins168
Are the accounts submitting this stuff coming from a particular IP range? Just
a suggestion but you could always block their subnet.

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huhtenberg
A very good question actually. How distributed is a spamming user base ? If
it's just one IP, it might be a work of a drone from a marketing department.

~~~
jsjenkins168
Might also be worth checking the IPs see if they are listed in Spamhaus block
list. If they are, then pretty good bet its organized spam.

<http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/>

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MisterMerkin
It might be a result of the Techcrunch exposure. I can just see someone
starting to hack some system up ever since they saw a new social news site
they hadn't heard of and therefore spammed.

Now is the time to be vigilant.

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GavinB
I wrote a great blog post explaining all about this site and how to block
their spam with no false positives, but I when I try to submit it I get
blocked!

[/lame joke]

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bmaier
Entrecard is a startup from the kid who made that million dollar wiki gimmick
I believe. From what I read it wouldnt surprise me if he was spamming news.yc
himself

~~~
rms
The people submitting the spam are entrecard affiliates -- you get entrecard
credits (which I think, but am not sure are good for page views or maybe
advertising credits) when you get people to sign up under your referral link.

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dkokelley
I can't provide any information on the spammer(s), but I commend you and HN
for keeping on top of stuff like this. Keep up the good work.

~~~
GrahamLangdon
Graham Langdon here, the founder of Entrecard.

Sorry for whatevers going on here, but we do not offer ANY affiliate program.
No one gets credits, or has ever gotten credits, for anyone signing up. The
move was intentionally to avoid link spam of any sort.

I'm interested to get to the bottom of this. Can you forward me some of the
links? This is very strange indeed.

~~~
GrahamLangdon
But now I can't resist on setting the record straight. We have nothing to do
with SEO, we are in no way an MLM, we do nothing with affiliate marketing. The
last thing I want is to be associated with that garbage.

We are simply a social network of high quality bloggers, visiting and
commenting on each other, driving traffic to each others blogs, and exchanging
goods and services with a virtual currency (these credits you keep hearing
about). We've hit 1400 on Alexa, we do about 1.5 million widget impressions
daily, and were invited to present at WebInno tomorrow.

