Just thought I'd see what you guys n gals think about my latest promotion to get DreamHost referrals? (I got 3 in the past 5 minutes already)

A. Killer title
B. Twisty story that is actually honest so doesn't come across like marketing.
C. Using my nice but sometime hated referall linking skills.
D. Making something out of nothing to benefit all parties involved..

1. the customer who will get a great service
2. the company gets a good customer for having a great product. And some of the more negative publicity out there gets pushed down and away from the public who instead see my article which loooks bad but isn't.
3. I get the joy of knowing I'm helping a good company get a good customer, and it makes me feel good to spell out the "ideal" way of handling life and especially business, in which all parties involved benefit. No, some people are just negative thinkers, stuck in negative loops of thought, and thats why there is really a limit to their success in life, and of course they then take it out on evryone else because it makes them feel a little better. Me? Homey don't play that.

I am of course referring to the fact that ONCE AGAIN I have banned from the wiki by the same person for silly nonsensical ego-bs. If they wouldn't allow someone to hurt their business like that I wonder where they would be? If I ouldn't have been repeatedly harassed and threatened off the wiki, I would never have started a blog, and those 10K visitors I get a day to my blog would all be at the wiki. Real f'n smart. And I waited a couple months to let things cool down, thinking that those guys had learned to look at situations in truthfulness and could just let me contribute to the wiki. WRONG. This time I got banned for a month after not posting in more than 2 months... and get this.. I got banned for posting a link to an article that I was asking a question about... ON A TALK PAGE! Oh the humility! A talk page nooooo! haha I love it! I mean its like, have any of you ever heard of something so incredibly petty? I love it!


DreamHost Employees shocked visitors today!

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Is it legit to completely copy dreamhost's "Employee Owned" page while replacing their signup link with your own?

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And some of the more negative publicity out there gets pushed down and away from the public who instead see my article which loooks bad but isn't.

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You mean:
1. The post from a prospective customer asking what support was like with the multiple positive responses?
2. The question about whether you could run teamspeak/ventrilo under dreamhost PS where the answer was "yes"?
3. The post from the person wanting to run a warez site at dreamhost who was notified that such a site would be against the dreamhost terms of service?
4. The post from someone wondering about the legal technicalities of creating a celebrity fansite?
5. The post wondering how much ffmpeg use would be ok at dreamhost?
6. The question from a user about whether they could run Karrigel where the answer was "yes"?
7. The question about how to "get around" the 200 email an hour limit for an active forum.
8. The post about how some *other* webhost was kicking users off for overly tight cpu restrictions and how maybe dreamhost would be better?

I find it odd and a bit disingenuous to suggest that you were trying to improve the tone of the forums at a time when it's been pretty clear of complaints for a record number of consecutive constructive posts.

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meh ... more SEO/spammish prattle, see previous response in the other thread.

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I am of course referring to the fact that ONCE AGAIN I have banned from the wiki by the same person for silly nonsensical ego-bs.

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Well, you are *1/3* accurate on that one; you did get banned, but it was *not* the same person that banned you this second time and you were banned for repeating behavior that got you banned (for a shorter period) the first time. None of what you describe as "silly nonsensical ego-bs" was involved at all, and you were banned by the same sysop that last "re-added" one of your links that had been questioned and removed.

Pay attention, read your Wiki talk page, and don't lie. Obfuscate, posture, position, spam, and promote to what ever degree you can get away with it wherever you can (some of us have grown to expect that from you), but do try to get your facts straight.

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This time I got banned for a month after not posting in more than 2 months... and get this.. I got banned for posting a link to an article that I was asking a question about... ON A TALK PAGE! Oh the humility! A talk page nooooo! haha I love it! I mean its like, have any of you ever heard of something so incredibly petty? I love it![

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It's good that you can find entertainment value in making a fool of yourself. It's also good that DH Wiki users can:

1) Read your whole history on the wiki (if they are willing to wade through the history of your self-promotional linking, and prior banning)

2) Take a break from having to deal with your self-serving edits on the DreamHost wiki for at least the next few days.

This is exactly this kind of "promotion" that leaves a foul taste in the mouth of many whenever SEO, or promotion, comes up for discussion. Yeah, I know you believe, as you have said previously, that "controversy" is "promotional", but at this point with you it has just become a nuisance.

--rlparker

I was just wondering about your site myself, as I remember reading about it in the DHSOTM not long ago and then just yesterday I came across a discussion in the wiki about you being banned from it.

To be honest I was shocked and appalled! Your site is full of useful information for Apache users and I couldn't BELIEVE you were being banned for spamming your website all over the wiki. But then I noticed that your user talk page is FULL of warnings. Those wiki OPs seem to be harassing you a lot!! But wait.... they seem to ONLY be harassing you!! Why is that do you think?
I mean... I've personally posted a bunch of PHP-related articles and have been active in developing the current PHP5 Install Script article in the wiki, I've linked to MANY external sites within those articles (at the bottom, official and unofficial), and I've yet to be even so much as warned for inappropriately labeling (or not labeling) an article, the links I provided, etc etc. I wonder why that is...... what do you think? Could it perhaps be because I'm not going around spamming my website all over the forums and the wiki?

If you wish to promote DreamHost, then I STRONGLY suggest you do so like the rest of us. Spamming your website and all of that seems to only be getting you into more and more trouble; and as DreamHost appears to be supporting those who are "harassing" you, you might strongly consider taking this as a sign that you're probably WRONG.

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Chips N Cheese - Custom PHP installs and the like!

Sage Weil page deletion from Wikipedia causes broken link in Dreamhost page.

> Your site is full of useful information for Apache users

I agree. Unfortunately the wiki admins are too invested in personal vendettas and selective enforcement of vague rules...

> they seem to ONLY be harassing you!

No, they "harass" anyone who who gets on their target list.

> I STRONGLY suggest you do so like the rest of us.

You mean getting control of the wiki early and "subtly" adding our self-promotion links in while nobody notices? Then protecting our favorites with admin power.

Edited by TCAS on 11/11/07 12:13 PM (server time).

Welcome to the forum, TCAS. I see this is your very first post, at least under this username anyway.

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I agree. Unfortunately the wiki admins are too invested in personal vendettas and selective enforcement of vague rules...

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That is your personal (and incorrect) opinion. The user in question used the DreamHost Wiki (and this forum) to drive traffic to a number of his sites by placing links all over the place, rather than by writing useful articles on the wiki itself. He also did the same thing with Wikipedia. Furthermore, he misused the DreamHost Wiki and this forum in an attempt to deceive DreamHosters into voting for his site in the DHSOTM contest.

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"subtly" adding our self-promotion links in while nobody notices? Then protecting our favorites with admin power.

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You are feeding misinformation. I provided a link to an extremely popular XHTML tutorial that I had written, that was too large to be transcribed to the DreamHost Wiki. No "admin powers" were used to "protect" anything. The XHTML article is not (and never has been) protected. The link was restored when a well-known troll removed it for his own personal reasons.


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Welcome to the forum, TCAS. I see this is your very first post, at least under this username anyway.

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I was waiting for rekraplr (or maybe wikidi) to weigh in on this thread ... it looks like I might be disappointed.

I do love it though that these threads often seem to be interesting enough to entice a "brand new user" to make their first post. Seems like few things get some people quite as excited as anything that looks like it might interfere with "freedom" to link-spam.

--rlparker

hehe... I see the same forum trolls are still trolling.. and possibly even growing! Do you have to eat many posters to get that big and mean? Or were you just born into the population? lol

I've learned not to argue with these types of stalwarts, they form an opinion based on others opinion's (truly no leaders in this lot) and then they stick to that opinion, come hell or high water, at all costs... for fear of being wrong.

I just let my wiki history, my blog posts, and my undying love of democracy and open-source to do my talking. Any half-intelligent person who comes across any of my stuff sees the value which clearly refutes any and all curious objections raised by the foolish, ignorant, and ill-informed.

Once again, you are all gentlemen and scholars, and I hope some day you see the light.

Boooooooost DreamHost Referrals!

And by "light" I am of course referring to my super-seo-spammy blog, AskApache.com which these trolls would have everyone believe is chock-full of spam and non-value articles, when in fact, I have one of the most popular blogs in the blogosphere hosted by DreamHost, and many of my most active readers are they themselves DreamHost employees, who rather enjoyed my latest article title I must say! :)

Boooooooost DreamHost Referrals!

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hehe... I see the same forum trolls are still trolling.. and possibly even growing! Do you have to eat many posters to get that big and mean? Or were you just born into the population? lol

I've learned not to argue with these types of stalwarts, they form an opinion based on others opinion's (truly no leaders in this lot) and then they stick to that opinion, come hell or high water, at all costs... for fear of being wrong.

I just let my wiki history, my blog posts, and my undying love of democracy and open-source to do my talking. Any half-intelligent person who comes across any of my stuff sees the value which clearly refutes any and all curious objections raised by the foolish, ignorant, and ill-informed.

Once again, you are all gentlemen and scholars, and I hope some day you see the light.

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For our readers, I thought I'd point out the propaganda techniques / advertising techniques used in this post*:
1. Ad Hominem: A Latin phrase which has come to mean attacking your opponent, as opposed to attacking their arguments.
2. Appeal to fear: Appeals to fear seek to build support by instilling anxieties and panic in the general population
3. Black-and-White fallacy: Presenting only two choices, with the product or idea being propagated as the better choice.
4. Big Lie: The repeating of a complex series of events that justify subsequent action.
5. Demonizing the enemy: Making individuals from the opposing nation, from a different ethnic group, or those who support the opposing viewpoint appear to be subhuman.
6. Transfer: Also known as "association," this is a technique of projecting positive or negative qualities of one entity to another to make the second more acceptable or to discredit it.

And of course, the worst part of this:
Argumentum ad nauseam: This argument approach uses tireless repetition of an idea.

Askapache is good at what he does, no doubt about that.

*much of this comes from the WikiPedia article on propaganda.

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I do love it though that these threads often seem to be interesting enough to entice a "brand new user" to make their first post.

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In what can only be a startling coincidence, a "brand new user" was created to launch a series of baseless attacks upon me in Wikipedia, largely concerning the Wikipedia article on DreamHost.


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i think Dreamhost is a pro-spam company? i never saw anyone spam so openly and especially at their own host. dont most hosts cancel for it?

Yeah, that is interesting (I see I get a mention by the new guy too). Fortunately, Wikipedia seems to sort that stuff out fairly effectively; there are often enough "non agenda driven" editors and gnomes about for those kinds of things to be generally ineffective.

--rlparker

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i think Dreamhost is a pro-spam company? i never saw anyone spam so openly and especially at their own host. dont most hosts cancel for it?

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I think of dreamhost as generally being anti-spam - particularly with their email policy and with their referral program. I dunno about general site spamming obnoxiousness, though. Is there something in the ToS about it? How does the dreamhost ToS compare with other hosts in this regard?

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Just thought I'd see what you guys n gals think about my latest promotion to get DreamHost referrals?

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I think your actions are against the DH TOS:

"Spam is a common slang term referring to the sending of unsolicited email, instant messaging, or other communication to a large group of people at once. Variations on this practice include off topic (and usually promotional) messages on bulletin boards, guestbooks, Usenet newsgroups, or chat rooms."

This forum seems to be included in the definition.

"Spam is strictly against our Terms and Conditions, and will result in the immediate disablement without refund of any customers who are found to have used spam in conjunction with their DreamHost account."

Last time, Jeff just slapped you...

"Electronic forums such as mail distribution lists and Usenet news groups all have expectations regarding subject area and appropriate etiquette for posting. Users of these forums should be considerate of the expectations and sensitivities of others on the network when posting material for electronic distribution."

At this point, your level of consideration has met my sensitivity.

"The network resources of DreamHost Web Hosting may not be used to impersonate another person or misrepresent authorization to act on behalf of others or DreamHost Web Hosting."

What I see is you lifting content directly from the DH website, and pasting it into your own site. You left the DH links for 'meet the team' and 'send us an email', but added your own link for signing up on top of the lifted text. While this link looks like it will go to your site, it actually does go to the DH sign-up page. This combination gives the impression DH provides a special endorsement for you in the original DH text. In my mind, this is a misrepresentation of your authorization to provide a promocode.

You also have the "sponsored by Dreamhost" link in the DH logo near the upper right portion of you page. Does DH really sponsor you? If DH sponsored me, I would link the DH logo directly to the DH front page as a thank you for the sponsorship. But this is not what you chose. While the apparent URL is on your site, you are just doing the same trick, and sending the curious to the same DH sign-up page.

I think you have so much to give, but it seems you would rather take.

Regards,
Rudy

That whole post is very well stated, Rudy.

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You also have the "sponsored by Dreamhost" link in the DH logo near the upper right portion of you page. Does DH really sponsor you? If DH sponsored me, I would link the DH logo directly to the DH front page as a thank you for the sponsorship. But this is not what you chose.

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I could be wrong, but I don't believe that site, or it's author, is "sponsored" in any way at all by DreamHost. I recognize, however, that it *might* be, as DreamHost, appears to have not objected to the use of the "Sponsored By Dreamhost" text, their own copy, or the use of the photograph on that page. I'm assuming they have seen the site (or at least some DH staff member/s has/have seen it), as the OP has commented on their reaction.

I'd be interested to know how the photographer who took the picture, or whoever actually holds the copyright on the picture, feels about it and whether it's use on that site is legally authorized.

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While the apparent URL is on your site, you are just doing the same trick, and sending the curious to the same DH sign-up page.

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..And sets two different rewards program related cookies at the same time.

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I think you have so much to give, but it seems you would rather take.

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I've commented before, in exchanges with the OP, that his site is only diminished by his linking practices; it's obvious he feels differently about it.

It's the same old "telemarketer, junk-mailer, fax-spammer, windshield-wiper littering, mailbox-clogging, porch-cluttering, link-spamming, in-your-face" methodology that "promoters" of this ilk have always used, no matter how much others dislike being subjected to it. In their mind, "it's all good" because they are "entrepreneurs", and they could not care less whether their tactics are welcome. No matter how they posture themselves at any given time, their acts make it clear that the only interests they care about are their own.

--rlparker

How do you get this really cool list of dreamhost servers and IPs?

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How do you get this really cool list of dreamhost servers and IPs?

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Ardco alert

Ok first of all, trying to say any of my contributions are even close to the spam referred to in the TOS is absolutely ridiculous, speculate if you want but I won't argue such logical fallacies, I do have a job.

Secondly, the only people in the whole world who are offended by my contributions are the 3 or 4 guys in this forum who have been harassing me and slandering me since I've been here, of which I have a detailed record in case of legal action.

DreamHost knows is that I support them on every page of my site, not to mention a huge number of clients hosted with them. I send other webmasters and web developers to DH, and they make excellent clients. And I am cool with DH because I am cool and give them and others the respect they deserve. I don't care who their friends are or how many posts they have.. If DH ever even had a slight issue with anything I am doing and let me know through an official channel, than obviously I would cease and desist immediately. But they realize I'm good for business, and everyone likes me.

We've even had lawyers look at some of these issues and the last time I was harrassed on a forum and my well-intentioned post turned into flames. I have been assured I am not even close to breaking TOS.

You 3 or 4 guys are the only ones with a problem, because you create these perceptions in your head. Anyone who actually reads anything I link to, sees that it is always relevant and not spammy at all. Don't be jealous because what I do produces results and what you do is troll and hate.

See what I meant about Synergy and negative loops of thought? Who wins with these guys? Nobody... its all about whats wrong and bringing people down to their level. Thats why they are trolls, they need to eat posters to feel better.

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