Spamming....?

[The JoJo]

Have any of you people received an e-mail like this?

HiWe have posted exhaustive tests of five 40GB hard disk drives at
http://www.harddiskinfo.com.We compare side by side the latest models from
Maxtor, Seagate, Fujitsu, IBMand Western Digital.Now you can easily find
out which is the most appropriate drive for yourneeds
at:http://www.harddiskinfo.com/Sections/Articles/Specific.asp?ArticleHeadli
ne=40GB%20Roundup%20Vol.1&Series=0 You are always welcome to send us your
comments and suggestions at: info@harddiskinfo.com. If you do not want to
receive other news from our site please e-mail: list-
remove@harddiskinfo.com. Please use the same e-mail account at which you
received this message and include only the word remove as the subject of
the message. Do not write anything within the message body itself.


Wonder where this came from...? Couldn't get to the site a minute ago...

[Mercutio]

There are two threads on SR about it, one in the admins forum here, and now this.


In short, pretty much everyone got a copy.

[P5-133XL]

I did not, or my E-mail filter removed it without me seeing it.

[CougTek]

I did not have it either and I don't have any filter. I don't know how they proceed to put their e-mail list together.

Their way to select the e-mail adresses they spammed has similarities with their review, both are weird. :-?

[timwhit]

I got it....did anyone read the review?

What did you all think?

-Tim

[flagreen]

I registered at their site and posted a thread there just to complain about the spamming. In less than 24 hours they deleted the post and my banished me from the forum. So now they have no posts in their forums at all. These aren't men running that site, they are high school kids at best. Scummy high school kids at that.

[Handruin]

I finally got a spam to an e-mail address I rarely use... I was surprised it got sent there. I wrote a nasty e-mail back to them regarding spamming me...I'm going to continue sending them every day for the next month until someone replies. :mrgrn:

[Mercutio]

Might as well automate!

$ crontab -e

0 12 * 2 * echo "You guys suck donkeys" | elm -s "Die spam-gargling moron" webmaster@harddiskinfo.com

[CougTek]

Ok guys, spamming is bad, but I think we should cool down about harddiskinfo.com. Maybe they spammed with bad intentions, but maybe they sent us an e-mail because they thought that with SR going the way of the Titanic, we could be of some help for them to create another great storage review site.

If you read their review, it's obvious they are lacking some knowledge about benching hard disk drives. But a look at their methodology page told me there isn't only bad things about them. They use a program (DTemp) to read the temperature from the S.M.A.R.T. function of the drive instead of relying on a less than precise thermal probe. That's a good point for them IMO. I don't know how good is SCSI Mechanics though, but it's one of their benchmarking utility, along with Winbench 99 (weird results) and IPEAK.

BTW, if you take a look at their testbed, it's pretty obvious what's their favorite OEM company ;-) . Their CPU heatsink, motherboard, enclosure, sound card, graphic card and a few other components are all from AOpen. That's not a bad thing, but I was amuzed the first time I saw that.

SR is still and will certainly remain my first choice when it comes to hard drives articles, but I like to have a second (X-bit Labs) or third look (maybe harddiskinfo?) at a drive, just to have a different opinion about a given product.

[Mercutio]

There is *no* excuse for a commercial organization to spam (unless that organization is Hormel, the people who make the pink stuff in the can). None. Period.

They can talk all day about whatever good intentions they might have had in sending us a link to their review. Too bad! If I want to read reviews of hard disks someplace other than SR, I'll pop over to google and find one. They need traffic? Also not my problem. Find a different, non-spam way to generate it. Ask for links on big hardware sites or something. Give away a prize for referrals (i.e. when new members join their forums, ask which current member referred them). Offer links to dirty pictures. Pay gobs of money to microsoft to get on the Windows desktop. Skywriting in silicon valley. Whatever.

There are other ways to get traffic that don't involve their crap landing in my junk e-mail box.

[flagreen]

Easy for you to talk CougTek, you're not Banned from their forums! Rub it in why don't you. :(

[Handruin]

Did they ban you by IP address or by e-mail? Look at them, they are covering up their tracks...I would not want to support them in any way. If they were tackful in practice to gain membership by exposing their site in a sincere fashion, then I would have no problem giving them a look-see.

In fact, there is nothing wrong with a little healthy competiton even if it was between SR and this new hard drive info place. At least it would benifit the reader as both sites would need to compete for first review in order to stay on top as the premiere HD info review site.

Now I'm going to try and get banned in their forum as well. :P

[Mercutio]

The first question for anyone thinking about going to get banned in their forums is, how the heck can you stand to look at their front page. It's awful.

And I'll bet their girlfriends are ugly, too.

[flagreen]

Did they ban you by IP address or by e-mail? Look at them, they are covering up their tracks...I would not want to support them in any way. If they were tackful in practice to gain membership by exposing their site in a sincere fashion, then I would have no problem giving them a look-see.

In fact, there is nothing wrong with a little healthy competiton even if it was between SR and this new hard drive info place. At least it would benifit the reader as both sites would need to compete for first review in order to stay on top as the premiere HD info review site.

Now I'm going to try and get banned in their forum as well. :P


It's not hard, you can do it! Go man, go!

[flagreen]

The first question for anyone thinking about going to get banned in their forums is, how the heck can you stand to look at their front page. It's awful.

And I'll bet their girlfriends are ugly, too.


Their Girlfriends would have to be ugly. I don't think there is any doubt about it. Yep, ugly and fat.

[flagreen]

Hey Doug did it! Sign up with them I mean. "Our newest member - Handruin" now to get banned!

[Handruin]

Check it out while it's still there:

http://www.harddiskinfo.com/Sections/FORUM/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=13


:mrgrn:

[Handruin]

Check this one out too:

http://www.harddiskinfo.com/Sections/FORUM/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=11

[flagreen]

Awesome! I give you about 12 hours to live over there. BTW - Your their Senior member, well Ok, the only member. Ha!

[flagreen]

If you go their Home Page you'll see a window which shows the latest forum Posts. At the moment it has Doug's which start off "Shady Business", in fact it shows it twice, as Doug posted it twice. So "Shady Business" looks a warning on their Home Page now. Good Stuff.

[Handruin]

LOL, I didn't even notice it on the front page...sweet! :D

[timwhit]

At least they could have enough of a backbone to respond to your post (Flagreen) instead of simply deleting the post. Any forum where posts are locked or deleted does not deserve to have any members of posts....

[James]

Funny you should say that. It looks like they deleted all the posts - at least, there seem to be only two posts in the whole forum, one by Doug, one by Admin, neither of which I can read.

[Handruin]

They didn't ban my account however...I will continue to post my disgust (tactfully) until they do.

[Handruin]

:mrgrn: I posted again to tell them to take me and the 50 others off their spam list.

[flagreen]

Good for you! But I fear you don't have long to live.

[Handruin]

Ah, see now they are editing my posts because they can't handle the truth. It looks like they took the forum down too.


I havent' given up making my point. They can't edit every post...
:sqnt:

[HellDiver]

Actually, their forums are very much online, they simply malformed the front page... If you want to access any of the specific forums, your direct links would be as follows :

* Reviews comments (http://www.harddiskinfo.com/Sections/FORUM/FORUM.asp?FORUM_ID=13).
* Users comments (http://www.harddiskinfo.com/Sections/FORUM/FORUM.asp?FORUM_ID=12).

The above two have Davin's and Handruin's posts, but there's also a truckload of other forums (RAID, WD, IBM, Mactor, SCSI, etc), all of them empty...