OK, this is too weird

keraptis · Post by **keraptis** » Sun Oct 31, 2004 2:15 pm

Has anybody been to www.asfr.com lately? It used to be Robotdoll's in the old days. Now, it sort of looks like it's about ASFR in that it announces itself as "The top MANNEQUINS resources on the net" and all the sub-headings on the page appear to be on-topic, but when you click on any of them you get highly generic search-enginey links to places like eBay, Amazon, and Overstock. Not to mention the creepy stock photo of the kids on the beach.

Does anybody know who's got that domain now? And what they intend to do with it?

ehy · Post by **ehy** » Sun Oct 31, 2004 3:28 pm

Looks like they have something that crawled the old site and made a page that included key words from it to make it look legit-ish. No humans involved. Wacky.

keraptis · Post by **keraptis** » Sun Oct 31, 2004 4:57 pm

ehy wrote:Looks like they have something that crawled the old site and made a page that included key words from it to make it look legit-ish. No humans involved. Wacky.

Yeah, that probably makes sense. I can't imagine it's possible to make any money doing that sort of thing, but that does appear to be what's going on.

Robotdoll · Post by **Robotdoll** » Sun Oct 31, 2004 7:31 pm

Simply stated, I was too late with the renewal for the domain a while back, and one of those companies that back-orders all the domains in the world in the hopes that happens got ahold of it. They'd sell it back to me for like $300, but it just didn't seem worth the headache.

'bot

kb7rky · Post by **kb7rky** » Sun Oct 31, 2004 7:36 pm

That just sucks...and we're talking Hoover Vacuum Cleaner-type sucks...

Doug

tully · Post by **tully** » Mon Nov 01, 2004 5:46 am

Perhaps we could take up a collection for RD so he can get it back?

I know I'd be willing to contribute.

Otaru Mamiya · Post by **Otaru Mamiya** » Mon Nov 01, 2004 4:24 pm

Wow... it's like the domain was bought by someone who doesn't even know what ASFR stands for... kinda pathetic, really. Ah, give them a few months to realize that they'll never make money off of a site like that, then the price will probably go down.

I do kinda agree with Robotdoll on this one though. It might be better to send the content to a site that we have up right now, rather than spend time and energy to resurrect asfr.com.

Svengli · Post by **Svengli** » Mon Nov 01, 2004 6:53 pm

This is what is known as a "link farm".

Essentially, it is created to fool google into thinking that some other site that this company owns is being linked to by a real website.

It's discusting, certainly.

At the same time, this phenomena may creating interesting effects in the future - since what we see is one AI dueling against another for money - which will result in more intelligent AI, which may eventually result in ... realistic fembots!

So it's an ill-wind that blows no good.

S

OK, this is too weird

OK, this is too weird

Cyber Vampires At Work