I was going through my twice daily routine of checking my server stats and noticed quite a few (over 50... distributed over a few hours) hits coming from differing thread urls from a particular forum site. I decide to check it out but it is set up for REGISTERED USERS only, ie., I can't view it unless I register. So I go through relatively minor hassle of registering and getting an email confirmation. Sure enough, once I have access and try entering the thread urls, they are 404--every single one of the forum ulrs were 404! I'm not sure if this is intentional or not but it did make me wonder.... I wonder how many other smaller forums do this to get registered users. It may or may not be effective depending on how well the 'target' sites are selected. Anyway, I thought it was kinda interesting.
I did not like the method. I guess those forums will just get lots of non-used accounts at the end. I think this method is useless and may be damaging for a forum. But thanks for sharing.
You know, even if I were trying to build a list this way (and I wouldn't), I can't imagine anyone I'd rather have on my list than recently-duped webmasters who checked their referrer logs and added their email to my fake forum only to find out it's a scam, heh. Imagine the complaint ratio. You'd probably be better off just spidering for emails on Google or something.
I would say that it is referer spam and making you have to sign up and then finding out that it is a 404 error page is just annoying and will actually make you not want to use them rather than use them. Also a forum that you can only view while logged in can't be good for the search engines as how are they surpose to crawl them.
It is referer spam, and it is not a cool way to make someone register at your forum. As this is annoying every new member will check it and then go away. At least I wouldn't stay to such a site
That's my suspicion as well. Probably altered the site TOS to allow for PIMPING of webmaster email addresses. Given the targeted nature of such a list, I'm sure it's worth quite a chunk of $$$. Be careful, guys. Use mailinator or some similar service.
You know this is just another one of those marketing strategies that people use in a half-ass fashion that could be extremely powerful for them if they wouldn't be so damn lazy! Imagine if these idiots actually took the time to make an informed post (good content) about something on your website and then clicked the link a few times (to complete the spam part of their mission). You might not fall for the trick and they might even have the chance of gaining you as a valuable forum member and possibly future customer. I mean you actually took the time to go there, signup and see what it was all about right? What would you have done if you found an informative post about your site there? All they would need to do is make one post like this per day and it would be a better strategy then they are using now! But, just like most people they are lazy and fell for someone's "make money quick on the internet like this" crap and instead are being talked about as spammers on another forum. I am not promoting this as a method (not that it would work right now anyway as most are so used to it by now they don't bother visiting for fear they will be added to a spam list) you should be using as it really is spam but it isn't too hard to figure out how valuable a way of advertising this could be to use if you aren't a complete lazy idiot about things.
Yeah, this seems like a lame way to treat your visitors to me. They will remember it and losing their trust like that can only have a negative effect on your ctr or roi, even if they are on your list. I would personally immediately opt out, but that's just me.
That's good, it's kind of like trackbacks from blog posts. I see this on DP actually. Someone will post about a cool site they found and eventually that webmaster comes and signs-up here to join in the discussion
Yeah, I am fairly certain that is how I ended up here. Glad I finally decided to dig further on these forums (have seen them and clicked off before) as there is a ton of good stuff here. What can I say, the power of the written word just works...