RSSCache: spammers

Excerpt: As Adam and Chris have noted, a company called D2Soft technologies decided to launch its potentially interesting new site rsscache.com by scraping email addresses from feeds and spamming them.

Excerpt: Eben gerade wurde ich per Spam auf den neuen Dienst RSSCache hingewiesen. Dabei bin ich allerdings nicht alleine, Adam Kalsey

Got the same e-mail as well. Rather sneaky I must say. I almost believed it was a genuine e-mail.

Slashdot could certainly use better RSS handling methods. Right now you get banned for 72 hours if you grab their RSS (RDF, actually) more than once every 30 minutes.

Their feed is a couple of kBs large, and doesn’t appear to be generated dynamically. You can hammer their front page every five seconds without repercussions, though, and that page is a couple of magnitudes larger.

I guess that goes well together with their “nested tables like it’s 1996” web design.

I’ve received spam to an address that only existed in my feeds too, but that was probably the result of random scraping of every linked file rather than targeted spam.

Hello,

I’m Benjamin Berube from D2Soft Technologies. True, we might have made a mistake, and we do apology. Our solution, RSScache.com, is really something we think will help RSS and all Web sites that gains popularity and for whom bandwidth is a problem. For that reason, we might have gone too fast in wanting RSS webmasters to know about our solution and sent emails to those, while we forgot the fact that our message wasn’t personalised for each webmaster, causing potential “madness” because of this. For that, yes, we feel sorry. However, we never intended to be spammers, and we’re not. Spammers don’t take time to answer to comments, they just spam.

Also, we are not using deceptive marketing practice. Maybe our text with our example is not clear enough, and we will correct it. However, it’s true that Slashdot, Penny Arcade and Blogger don’t use our system, and we never intended to say they do. We’re simply giving examples on how our service can be used with real feeds example.

Thanks for your time.

Thanks Adam for this info.

When I wrote a post on Comment Spammers a while ago, I recall someone, maybe you, saying spammers are attacking RSS feeds, trackbacks, “email this post to a friend”, guestbooks, pings, any interactive functionality of a blog.

Can you refresh my memory where I might have come across this?