Impact of HTML Forms On My Life

I used to think a web page without a forum was no kind of web page at all. A community seemed to give every web site meaning. I was addicted to web-forums, really. It was bad. Making thousands of posts every month to a wide variety of online communities…

I'm happy to say that I'm clean of web-forums. Now I look back on the days when I was projectile vomiting BBcode and shudder. So horribly wrong.

At some point, while I was tinkering and developing on Vaxine 1.0, I'd opened up the page submission form and in that small window of time, 137 pages were posted containing entirely gibberish. Some of the content looks like MD5 hashes, some were URL's amusingly encapsulated in BBcode … I guess spammers will never proof-read to see if their intended links are actually clickable or not.

It still amazes me how much bandwidth and processing time these folks are willing to sink into presenting things that nobody will look at. Seriously: None of the content they dumped into my database saw the light of day. I had no idea it was there until just now when I was working on converting the material over.

So congratulations, spammers: You got me to whois your expired domains and to download some text to my HDD shortly before deleting it. One more victory for the might of your advertisement prowess.