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?

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.

[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.

[kf → Saphrym]

http://entrecard.com/forums/7/5341

[Saphrym → kf]

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

[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.

[kf → andr]

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 → kf]

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/

[kf → andr]

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

[jsjenkins168]

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

[pg → jsjenkins168]

No, the IPs are all different. It seems to be a bunch of individuals submitting their own blogs. What's odd is they happened all at once.

[huhtenberg → jsjenkins168]

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 → huhtenberg]

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/

[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.

[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

[kf → bmaier]

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.

[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]

[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 → dkokelley]

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 → 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.