CosmoQuest’s forums are built on the heritage of the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today (and resulting BAUT) forums. Over the many years of it’s existence, these forums have repeatedly come under attack by spammers who are seeking to increase their Google Rankings by leaving links on our blog. In a few cases, hackers have broken our login systems, and truth be told, CosmoQuest’s CMS (built on MediaWiki) was broken to the point that we’re simply going to have to completely replace it. Trying to handle the hacks costs us staff time, which costs us money. Trying to moderate the spam costs our moderators energy and time they volunteer – time I’d rather see going into talking science and mediating good science related dialogues.

Google is aware of this problem, and they have reacted by penalizing companies that have employed spammers to raise their Google rankings. I’m now getting a steady stream of requests that I use my time to find their links, remove their links, and in many cases they threaten that if I don’t bad things will happen to me. Rarely, companies apologize.

Let me put this another way: People who paid spammers to harm my site or one of its heritage sites are now demanding that – for free – I find and destroy the links their spammers left, and if I don’t, many of them threaten harm.

Below is the email I am responding with. Below that is a list of the companies that have contacted me and a summary of how those interactions have been (apologetic, factual, threatening), and if there has been positive or negative followup interactions. On the vague chance that one of these companies actually makes a donation, thanks for doing the right things will go out via social media.

Dear [name]:

If you find the bad links on my site and report them as spam using the existing site functionality, they will get handled by our software and moderator team through normal means. [note: the following sentence was added 1/11/2014] If posts from a user are reported, that will lead to the user being banned. Please note: We cannot justify editing a user’s profiles unless they break our terms of service.  If the problem is only with a user profile, you will need to have the user  – the company or person you hired – login into the account they created and remove the link.

Over the years, spam links like the ones you paid someone to leave on our site have cost our forums significant time (and salary money) to handle. Some spammers have hacked our site code causing us to have site down time and to lose the confidence of our community members. This means that instead of focusing on science, we’ve had to spend money and effort focused on undoing the damage done by people you paid to promote your brand.

If you would please consider donating to our site to help pay for the damage your site caused, I would greatly appreciate it. You can donate at http://CosmoQuest.org/Donate

Please note, I will be posting on our site a list of everyone who sends me these emails, and I’ll be listing if the people made a good faith effort to apologize the damages they did or if their emails simply threatened us with damage to our site and its rankings. [note: the following sentence was added 12/30/2013] This is meant to praise people trying to repair harm and call out those who are threatening our livelihood. http://cosmoquest.org/x/2013/12/spammers-naming-names/

Sincerely,

Dr. Pamela Gay
CosmoQuest.org

Companies who contacted us and received above (this list will get updated over time):

• 01 Dec 13 leadactivate.com (Ryan Miller)
  initial email: admit hired bad firm, apologized, asked for help
• 24 Nov 13 premierglow.com (Jeremy Thompson)
  initial email: admit hired bad firm, apologized, asked for help
• 29 Nov 13 specsuperstore.com (Rowan)
  initial email: Threaten to report us to google if link not removed.
  email was repeated Dec 20, I responded again the same
  9 Jan 14, issued a DMCA take down of our site due to links.
  25 Jan 14 sent another identical email. I responded the same again.
  24 Jan 14 sent another identical email. I responded the same again.
  25 Jan 14 sent another identical email. I responded the same again.
• 22 Nov 13 rockmanscreativemedia.com.au (Marcus Robb)
  initial email: admit hired bad firm, apologized, asked for help
  response: He sent back the same email on 12/4/2013 (and I responded the same)
• 29 Dec 13 horizonstructures.com (Rachel Carbon)
  initial email: admit hired bad firm, apologized, asked for help
• 07 Jan 14 http://mesothelioma.us/ (no name)
  initial email: Claimed several emails had been sent (they hadn’t) and included vague threat
  response: Very courteous email. A first!
• 11 Jan 14 www.rapidrecoverysolution.com (Matt)
  initial email: admit hired bad firm, apologized, asked for help
• 13 Feb 14 Discountwatchstore.com (John)
  initial email: Asked us to remove links or they would report us
  email was repeated 16 Feb 2014, I responded the same
  email was repeated 19 Feb 2014, I responded the same
• 6 June 14 Bayvista.co.uk (Tony)
  initial email: Fair email admitting bad links are harmful and need removed
  email was repeated 9 June 2014, I responded the same
  email was repeated 15 June 2014, I again responded the same

Before I realized how many people were going to email me, I hand responded to a dozen or so requests. It is all so frustrating. All I can say is the letters do seem to be getting less threatening with time. Hopefully companies are realizing they can’t be bullies when asking for help.