Jesus Christ. Have we forgotten already what Chico's deal was?Marky Dread wrote:This is the internet and you should be free to say whatever you like. So if Chico wants to post here then I say why not? The fact that I think he's a cunt shouldn't come into it.
Racism, Homophobia, and other evils are inherent in us all. Personally I love gay, black, Jewish people.
The dude was a spammer. He carpet-bombed the same exact posts on a half-dozen totally unrelated forums across the internet to pump the search results for his Oxford, Mississippi entertainment events blog, pump the search results for music venues he was a paid promoter at, and pump the search results for his freelance alt-weekly writing career by reposting in-full articles he wrote years ago. Feed any thread title he started into Google and you'd find 2 or 3 more forums posted word-for-word within 20 minutes of each other. Is that discussion?
And he is still doing this today on discussion forums. He gets banned from them routinely, and posters on other ones complain about the same exact threadbombing he did here. When it gets too hot to handle, he fucks off without a trace and starts doing the same exact thing on a different forum. All those celebrity birthday posts, hitchhiking stories, and concerts he allegedly saw...he was using it to make money for his employers and get a higher Google AdSense score. IMCT happens to get crawled very frequently by Google, as you can see from the bots on the homepage. It turns up very frequently in keyword searches...just punch up any of the non-sequiturs we talk about and if it's halfway specific you're going to see an IMCT link. He chose this forum because it places consistently high on search results. The other forums he pulls this act on...mainly indie record label official forums and some other high-profile band forums...place similarly high. It wasn't an accident. It was Search Engine Optimization 101. Shit like starting a new thread for every celebrity birthday simulcast from his blog and 6 other forums. Shit like taking the super-active concert thread and bombing it with paid advertisements for the events list at Proud Larry's. That is SEO behavior that's going to hit higher on a Google search than a regular forum reply inside an ongoing discussion. It is textbook SEO behavior. We've been lucky that he's the only such person who's abused this site like that before. It's different behavior than the automated bots. But it is extremely common behavior across the net, especially on Facebook. Those people you have to weed out who are just parasiting on your friend list to promote their "personal brand"...those are the Chicos. That's what we had here.
Do you get it, Marky? He was little different from the kitchen spammers, and had no interest in engaging anyone beyond what would up his brand on search results. In fact, when Hoy confronted him on PM's about the non-sequiturs and threadbombing and suggested he might want to engage the community a little more, Chico just laughed him off. OK? He was not just some dude who pissed people off. He was hijacking this site for advertising and following a tried-and-true pattern of SEO behavior. That degrades the quality of the forums the same way the spambots do if it runs rampant. Thankfully, he was such a chickenshit he didn't even try to defend himself when he got caught. He just left forever and found himself more forums to start spamming. Next time it happens we might get an SEO spammer with even less shame who doesn't go away until he's outright banned, or who creates 6 different alt accounts to make himself sound like a crowd of people. That's why "live and let live" doesn't work for every single situation. Generic assholes, sure...take your pick. But if the forum doesn't stay vigilant and recognize the obvious spammer behavior for what it is, it becomes a cancer, multiplies, and destroys the forum. You do not have to look far online to find once-thriving places that succumbed to either the bot spammers or the SEO douchebags because they got too far embedded and it became too little too late to reverse it.
It's only "live and let live" if the other party is willing to do the same to you and the community. Spammers aren't willing to do that. They have one goal only: $$$ and search hits. There IS a difference between generic internet asshole and a spammer. Chico was it.
WHO THE FUCK BUMPED THIS THREAD?!?!?!