FluxLead Are Scum

There are more than a few “social networking” sites. Facebook is the site of choice for students, Scrabble enthusiasts and ex-students, MySpace is the site of choice for chavs, bands and morons, and Orkut is the preferred site for… er, other people. Exactly who uses The Richard Dawkins Social Networking Site is a mystery to me, although that’s principally because their sign-up form doesn’t work.

Another is FluxLead. But unfortunately, FluxLead are total scumbag cunt-twats, a slightly-tautological word I made up to increase the vitriol contained in the link text, which I know is used to characterise websites by search engines. FluxLead put a lot of stock in this. I know this because their principal form of advertisement is trackback spam on blogs. I have many of their spam messages in my database, although I’ve set my blog up not to show them to you. If you do a Google search for “Trackback from FluxLead”,  you’ll find a number of websites they’ve hit (currently 37), and that excludes ones not indexed and ones that deleted it: you won’t find their attempted spam on this site on Google. One of these, though, is the second hit returned by searching for Fluxlead, so probably this page has a chance of taking that spot.

Now, I wouldn’t dream of writing them off right away for this, though. There’s no reason at all to think that they aren’t lovely people who set up a website with the best of intentions, then naïvely hired a really shitty marketing firm who trained spambots to inject spurious blog comments linking to Fluxlead in order to increase its PageRank. So I asked Fluxlead about the links.

Somebody at [ip.xx.xx.xx] just placed an irrelevant advert for your website on my blog, in the form of a trackback. I do not appreciate having my website hijacked as a billboard for anyone without my consent. Do you endorse such spam, and if not, why am I receiving it?

This was the 10th of October. They’ve had two months now to answer that question. They’ve not taken even the basic minimum effort to appear reasonable. So I am left only to assume that they’re unprincipled scum. This notion is confounded by the fact that they’re very obviously not simply “a social networking site”, but it very obvious Facebook rip-off. They have a narrow, dark-blue-on-white website with a big, friendly deep green “sing up” button… The key difference, though, is that Facebook looks like a professional job, and FluxLead looks distinctly amateur. The terms of service are badly punctuated and laid out, and the whole site is littered with shitty clip-art. It looks rubbish.

It seems to be not doing too well: one of the “newest members” is called “ronnie”, and it won’t let you duplicate usernames.

I am glad they are failing. Serves them right.