Simone 'Wiz' Tellini - Site

"I am interested in purchasing a text link to my site on yours"

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:27:00 -0700

I've just received a suspicious email:

Hello,

I am interested in purchasing a text link to my site on yours - tellini.info . Could you please advise what is the price for advertising space on your site?

Thank you in advance

Why suspicious?

For starters, I don't get that many visitors to justify the many advertising offers I've been receiving lately.

Also, if you were serious about your offer, you'd send a better email, at least you would properly introduce yourself. Instead the sender used an address like "yahoo.comrosecamara@centrum.cz", but set a reply-to to a different mailbox. I've googled a bit and the first address seems a known scammers fake email.

Finally, searching for the mail content on Google, brought me to this post of another blogger who's had the same experience. It contains a link that explains why these people need those links.

In conclusion, this is an open answer to whoever is going to ask again: I'm not interested in helping you with your advertising spam!

Captcha breakers? No, thanks!

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:37:24 -0700

Several months ago, I've added a captcha check to the contact page to stop spammers from flooding my mailbox.

Today, with much surprise, I've received a comment to that post from a guy trying to sell his services:

We the leading Data processing company in Bangladesh. Presently we are processing 300000+ captcha per day by our 55 operators. We have a well set up and We can give the law rate for the captcha solving.

Our rate $2 per 1000 captcha.

We just wanna make the relationship for long terms. can we go forward?

What?! No, we can NOT go forward.

Unbelievable.

I didn't even imagine that someone would employ people just to break captcha barriers and push spam through.

Captcha

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:42:59 -0700

I really hate spam (who doesn't?), that's why I've just added a captcha check to the contact page.

Hopefully it will stop all those spamming bots that have been targeting the site...

Looking for "simone map editor"?

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:03:00 -0700

Every time I look at the referrer statistics of this site I can't help noticing that many visitors came here while searching for "simone map editor" (or something similar) on Google or other search engines.

A quick query on my logminer database returned this data:

wiz=> select count(*) as hits, count(*) / extract( day from max(req_time) - min(req_time)) as "daily average" from accesses where referrer in ( select id from referrers where lower( referrer ) like '%simone%map%editor%' ); hits | daily average ------+------------------- 510 | 0.697674418604651 (1 row)

It's about one misled visitor every day and a half.

Will one of those wanderers please stop by and tell me what the heck is "Simone" (apart from being my name ) and what's so interesting in it?

Site update

nospam@example.com (Simone) — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 17:23:30 -0800

As of today, the site has been completely renewed!

Well, almost completely.

Actually, it's pretty much the same as it was before: it's just on a new server, with a blog engine to handle this frontpage and with up-to-date copyright years.

Oh, there's also a new shiny picture of me!