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Beware the FFAnet site announcement serviceMay 30 '00 (Updated Dec 31 '00) Write an essay on this topic.If you have a web page there's a pretty good chance that you've had to deal with the fun of submitting it to search engines. If you've been involved with creating web sites for others then you'll be an old hand at it. Now what does this have to do with spam I hear you ask. A lot if you've added your site through FFAnet announcement service. FFAnet provides free pages for people to create announcement lists of sites that I'm sure involves some sort of commission for the site owner. You add your site, it goes to the top of the list and is cycled off once a certain number of other sites have been added after yours. All well and good, and if used responsibly, not a bad idea. The big problem is that these sites collect your email address. Supposedly they are permitted two auto-responds of a successful submission and a notification of your site being cycled off the page — and grounds for termination from the program include using collected email addresses that are more than 14 days old. The vast majority of FFAnet users stick to this policy, but there are a handful that use the service purely to collect legitimate email addresses for spam lists — as FFAnet validates all entered email addresses from people that sign on to a page. Normally I would have seen the service and dismissed it. But I got caught out when I used a third party software package and as well as submitting to search engines, foolishly selected the announcement sites option. Low and behold, I was successfully signed onto several hundred announcement sites (mostly FFAnet) and within a minute my inbox was flooded with welcome messages. I didn't realise they would grab my email and flood me with spam — rather stupid of me in retrospect and something I should have researched properly beforehand. I had not agreed to be inundated with email and I had no warning that it was part of the deal. This was my first dealing with announcement sites — and it is definitely the last. As I said most FFAnet members only send you the two emails — with their own advertising tacked on the end, I can live with that — but a handful are still sending me spam now. This is definitely abusing the FFAnet TOS. Some of the abusers have removal instructions — most of which are bogus — but the majority don't. So I have a filter set up on my email that deletes them before I even see them. This removes the bulk of offenders, but I have received abusive email from one FFAnet member (who was in breach of the regulations) having a go at me for trying to stop his annoying spam and then having the gall to claim I knowingly signed up to a opt-in list. So be aware of who gets your email address. And be very wary of email gatherers masquerading as legitimate services. So is it worth submitting your details to an announcement site. To me, no — I've never used an announcement service to find something and the nature of the service makes it difficult to keep the pages fresh within search engines. If you do use the srevices to find new sites, then it may be worth your while. But for me, it was more trouble than it was worth an I'd recommend giving them a miss. My experiences with FFAnet have been very negative. If you'd like to see an example of this service being used for good instead of evil, please check out Renewal2's experiences as a member. My Excellent FFA Adventure — Chapter One http://redwolf.epinions.com/webs-review-3D62-88E01F8-399C2684-prod6 My Excellent FFA Adventure — Chapter Two http://redwolf.epinions.com/webs-review-700F-411550D-39A5CFE7-prod2 © 2000 Red Wolf — All rights reserved  |
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by texas-swede
