People use Wpoison
for two reasons, the first is public-spirited, and the second is
entirely
selfish.[1]
Public-spirited netizens install and use
Wpoison in the
interest of the Common Good. The hope is that by using
Wpoison
to pollute the e-mail address data bases of spammers (hopefully
beyond repair) we will all end up getting less spam.
On the other hand, you don't have to be a public-spirited
benefactor in order to have a good reason to use
Wpoison.
Even if you don't give a darn about the rest of us who share
the Internet with you, and even if you don't give a darn how
much spam we have to suffer with, you may still want to
install and use
Wpoison
on your own web site just as a way of reducing your own
daily spam intake.
To understand why this might be the case, you must first understand
that when a spammer turns loose one of these
address harvesting web crawlers against your web
site, the odds are pretty darn good that unless you do something
to thwart him, he will harvest your e-mail address,
any probably also all of the other web-accessible e-mail
addresses of the other people in your company, department, school,
University, military installation, or non-profit organization also.
The result, of course, is that you
(and probably all of your nearby colleagues as well)
will get spammed, definitely by
at least that spammer, but also by anybody he later sells
your e-mail address
to.[2]
To prevent this, you can and should install a copy of
Wpoison someplace
on your web site, and then install
invisible links to it
in as many of your web pages as possible, and most definitely
from any and all web pages on your web site that contain e-mail
addresses.
In effect, using
Wpoison
in this way on your web site should act as a type of
inoculation against the evil
address harvesting web crawlers. If they start to try to
harvest e-mail addresses from your web site... well.. they
will end up getting a lot more than they bargained for!
And just like Real World[tm]
inoculations against
more traditional diseases, each time a person protects himself
or herself, they are also doing a Good Thing for the general public
health as well. Each time John Q. Public thwarts either a spammer
or a smallpox germ, that is one less potential problem for you,
for me, and for everybody. So please help us all by helping
yourself!
Download and install a copy of
Wpoison on your
own web site today! You'll be glad you did, tomorrow, and the
next day, and the day after that.
[1]
The author doesn't really care which motivation
moves you to use
Wpoison.
He is just hoping that you will use it, regardless of your
reasons.
[2]
Quite a lot of spammers seem to have given
up on selling any sort of legitimate or illegitimate products, and
many now confine themselves to just selling CDs containing vast
numbers of e-mail addresses to other spammers. And this makes
sense, at least when you use spammer-think, because the goal of
all spammers is to make money without having to do any actual
work... or at any rate, as little as possible... and
creating huge lists of e-mail addresses and then putting them onto
CDs and selling them requires about as much creativity and labor
as making photocopies of the phone book and then trying to sell
those photocopies to people who are even stupider and lazier
than you are.