I'm sure some if not all of you have ran across a wowgold spammer in your time. Anyhow, I got to talking on another board about spam and I thought of wowgold. So I did a search and came with with tons of links. And each and every time I clicked on a link they all come up Warcart When I was getting wowgold spam back in the day I did a search and found that wowgold was spamming Blizzard forums like mad...the company that designed Warcraft and other online games. It was so bad that Blizzard had filed a law suit with the company. So the company or the people hired to spam are trying to get even I guess.
In the United States, World of Warcraft brings in about $700 million per year in recurring revenue. This doesn't account for box sales, character customization or server moves. If you include worldwide revenues it will be much higher since only about 1/3rd of their customers are in the United States. Even though its against Blizzard's TOS to buy or sell ingame resources, IGE makes about $10 million a year selling gold, items and accounts in the game. IGE is the world's largest seller of MMO Resources. Spamming for them can be very profitable unfortunately. I would suggest using Akismet or censoring wowgold. There is also a keyword based spam detecting module available at vBulletin.org Forum - The Official vBulletin Resource! that could help with this. If their content can't be see properly on your site they will eventually move on to more viable targets.
Now wowgold is a company who sells items for Blizzard games? Anyhow, I don't have much of an issue with wowgold anymore, it just came up while talking about proactive banning and using tools like that Keyword module. I just thought it was crazy to see so many links saying wowgold that linked back to warcraft.
I am surprised Blizzard has not been able to permanently put IGE out of business. It's also surprising how much money they make off something that isn't theirs... and that it is against Blizz's TOS.
Ugh, I hate that site. I hate spammers, you can find patterns in IP's if you're bored enough and just wildcard it. Most of those spammers tend to use Indian broadband or satellite IP's.
Yeah, it's insane. I wonder what the people behind the site do in real life. If that is how they are making their living, what are they doing in their free time?
There are lawsuits pending on this: Gamasutra - News - WoW Gold Farmers IGE, Peons4Hire Targeted In Lawsuits My guess is that Blizzard put all of their efforts into the Glider lawsuit. Now that is over they might turn their attention and million dollar a year retainer elsewhere.
I'll be honest when I say I have absolutely no idea what you guys are talking about. I'm so cold and lonely
