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Spam Entertainment Games Your Rights Online

Online Game Encouraging Spam 56

Posted by Zonk from the dubious-techniques-to-say-the-least dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Outwar.com (an online game) has posted instructions on how to spam their unique link using underhanded and fraudulent techniques such as misleading URLs in forums and emails." Evidently by having people click on their link, players gain in-game power. These tips seem to directly contradict their stated spam policy. Shady.
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Online Game Encouraging Spam More

Online Game Encouraging Spam

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  • Some games are just plain more like real life every day.

    • Re:Online resembles real life more every day (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ayaress ( 662020 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @01:43PM (#10376125) Journal
      The whole point of Outwars is effectively the same as the point of spam, too. The idea is that you get people to click your link. More clicks=higher score. It's always been exactly like spam, just without the penis enlargement (or should I say pe..n''is en'lar;ge.ment) and such.

      • Outwar vs. Outwars (Score:5, Informative)

        by Doc Hopper ( 59070 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @08:20PM (#10379700) Homepage Journal
        Allow me to take a moment to clarify: there's a huge difference between the game under discussion, called Outwar [outwar.com] and the jetpack-based shooter (ala Starship Troopers, the book) called Outwars [microsoft.com], which predated Outwar by half a decade. Singletrac the company is now defunct, but were a bunch of game developers having a great time making great games. Unfortunately, Outwars wasn't one of those great games. But it was a pretty fun game that didn't involve spam :)

        Disclaimer: I'm listed twice in the credits for Outwars, once as the network admin, and once as a model. The guy we'd planned on shooting didn't show up, so they stuck overweight, slightly-German-looking me in instead.

  • Good (Score:4, Funny)

    by vijaya_chandra ( 618284 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @12:56PM (#10375689)
    It's good to have someone non-anonymous that you can sue for the spam you get

    All your spam are belong to us

  • This is outrageous! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @12:57PM (#10375698)
    This outrageous!

    PS: Check out this neat website...

    Funny Pictures! [outwar.com]

  • Heh (Score:5, Funny)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @01:00PM (#10375719) Journal
    So this "game" is to exercise those skills gained from years of hidden goatse.cx link posting, and to trick people into going to their ad-filled site.

    At least if people have an outlet, maybe they won't post so many hidden goatse links. [www.goat.cx] :)

    • Re:Heh (Score:5, Informative)

      by {8_8} ( 31689 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @01:22PM (#10375930) Journal
      The game involves getting people to click on the link once every 24 hours for as long as possible, but this isn't the ultimate goal. I played an Outwar variant called Kings of Chaos for a bit, so the following is based on that game.

      The actual game works like this: More clickage = more gold = more stuff = higher rank. Every unique click gets you one soldier for your army, and every soldier increases the amount of cash you earn every turn. More gold lets you outfit your army with better armor and weapons. Better armor lets you defend against attacks by other players, which lets you keep your turn-based gold longer. Better weapons let you overcome other players' defense and steal their turn-based gold. The more gold you have, the more stuff you can buy so you can attack and defend better so you can get/keep more gold, ad nauseum. Your ranking is determined by the amount of weapons and armor you have.

      As you can imagine, the game is dominated by players who get the most people to click their links. There is little to no actual skill involved beyond that of hidden link spammage or social networking. Unless you hook up with one of the player alliances who trade clicks or have a popular website where you can post your link, the game turns you into a link whore that goes around spamming "PLES CLECK LINK KTHX."
      • There's also a few Proxie auto-click programs that rotate through a list of x amount of proxies every 24 hours or so generating a hit for your account from each one.

        From when I used to mess around with this kind of thing the going charge for the software was $24.95
      • KoC has a fairly strong anti-spammin system in place, whoever goes to the page must voluntaraly select the link matching an image in order to count for anything, while outwar is built around ads and spamming, KoC may still suck hard but at least it's not a parasitic kind of sucking.

    • Re:Heh (Score:1)

      by qoa ( 704941 )
      I like at the bottom where it says something like: "Are your friends no longer clicking links you send to them, and checking urls? Sign up for free hosting somewhere, and send them a url to a page with this in it..." With a snippet of meta-refresh code. They sure wouldn't be my friend long. On a side note, whoever started that game is making a nice proffit off of all those free ad impressions the "players" are sending him.
    • "At least if people have an outlet, maybe they won't post so many hidden goatse links. [www.goat.cx] :) Aren't you glad that you set your /. prefs to reveal the doamin for every link?

  • The connection was refused. (Score:4, Funny)

    by FooAtWFU ( 699187 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @01:00PM (#10375726) Homepage
    Well, it seems that their server is down. I guess they got a few too many people clicketyclickclicking on the links. I can't say I'm displeased.

    Note also that this is linkspam, as opposed to emailspam. Not that this makes it ethical or anything...

  • Not news, exactly. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Incoherent07 ( 695470 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @01:01PM (#10375732)
    Outwar has been doing this for a long time... various sites with similar demographics (for example, http://www.newgrounds.com/ [newgrounds.com]) have had to deal with the issue of spamming Outwar links for years. In most of those places it's bannable, or whatever the equivalent is.

    Unfortunately, there's really no way to police something like this... a game that's designed such that the more people you can get to click on your links, the better you do. All you can really do is try to keep people from posting them.

    • Re:Not news, exactly. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
      just set up your server to mutate any outwar links into a link to a page containing hundreds of frames, each containing an outwar-server hosted image in order to suck up their bandwidth. salt on a leach.

  • Lame game (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scumdamn ( 82357 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @01:01PM (#10375733)
    This is the crappiest thing I've ever seen. I mean, now not only do we have professional spammers innundating us with massive amounts of lame vi4gr4 but now every cretinous AOLer who plays this game will be telling all his friends "j00 have too see these funny pictures!!! Their great!"
    If any of my friends managed to get a single power point from me I would rag on them for the rest of their short, pathetic lives. Every time they logged into their email they'd receive a deluge of the worst, most heinous spam and goatse links.

  • They left out a step (Score:3)

    by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @01:01PM (#10375734)
    Step 1: Set up a sneaky and misleading links so you can trick your "friends" repeatedly to go to some stupid site for your benefit.
    Step 2: "Send your friends the link" ... "they will have no idea it is going to bring them to your secret link page. You tricked them again!"
    Step 3: Profit!!! (well, kind of anyways)
    Step 4: Wonder why you have no friends anymore.
  • So the purpose of the game is to get people to click on your links. Each page is a PHP page which makes an MySQL query.

    I dare say that being put on Slashdot will bring the server to it's knees.

    FAQ [outwar.com]

    The purpose of outwar is to develop your character by gaining power and earning money.

    How do I gain power? Every time someone clicks on your secret link, your character will gain power. Try placing your secret link somewhere people will see it; such as in your profile, away message, or a web page.
  • I tried the link and got a message saying my connection was refused. Not down or broken, but refused. I wonder if they're blocking everyone with slashdot in the referrer.
  • "Now serving NO Adware and NO ActiveX pop-ups!"

    So...is anyone *really* surprised after that?
  • One of the communities that I run has 25,000 registered users who are active on the discussion boards. As a matter of practice, if somebody posts one of these bullshit links, the post is immediately removed, and both the user account and the IP are banned.

    I just don't have any patience for that shit.

    -Waldo Jaquith

  • HOWTO: Trick your friends! -- How juvenile! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Asprin ( 545477 ) <gsarnoldNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @01:16PM (#10375885) Homepage Journal

    Wow, a whole page on how to trick your friends into looking at ads. Good luck getting them to read you emails ever again! (Of course, it sounds like nobody over 16 plays this game, so the target audience is probably pretty gullible.)

  • I suggest we really fuck up the game. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @01:23PM (#10375945) Journal

    By writing a script that will access a random referer ID. Considering it uses just plain standard HTTP, this wouldn't be much of an issue. Unfortunately, they got a system so that you can only click one of their damned links every 5 minutes, but I'm sure some rudementary IP spoofing will get through that. Ethical? No. Legal? Not really. Justified? Very.

    Fight fire with fire.

  • These tips seem to directly contradict their stated spam policy.

    As sleazy as I think this is, it does not technically violate their anti-SPAM policy which forbids sending unsolicited e-mails, and posting off-topic messages to newsgroups.

    The page in question just suggests that you add the links to existing messages, not that you create new ones just to promote the links. They specifically tell you not to post messages to random message boards, and that mass e-mails are considered SPAM.

    Of course, I wo

    • Re:This is not technically a spam policy violation (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Oh man, but do they do it. About a year ago, the AIM chatrooms still somewhat existed, and I went into Gaming or Computing chat every now and then.

      Once outwar started, spam came left and right. People set up bots, and reporting them didn't do any good. Outwar does not care for their own spam policy.

      After a while, I stopped chatting on AIM. The spam was unbearable. When there weren't porn bots, there were outwar or "Kings of Chaos" bots. Sometimes they tricked people by setting up a redirecion link, or thr
    • I would never buy a game

      Good, because it's free. How do you think they get so many assinine 12 year old AOL users to sign up and spam the living fuck out of every message board and guestbook they can find?

  • I get it... (Score:3, Funny)

    by dmayle ( 200765 ) * on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @04:28PM (#10377966) Homepage Journal

    Oh my, I finally get it! Roland Piquepaille is playing Outwar! ;)

  • uh (Score:2, Informative)

    by TheBot ( 806046 )
    This is completly old news. Many, MANY people have been doing this for a long time. Geez, welcome to 1999.

  • Not surprising, referral based games encourage it. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WiredOni ( 593210 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @06:03PM (#10378824)
    I am not surprised at this announcement, people have been spamming these links through various online forums for quite some time now. They do absolute noting to fix this spamming problem, and their so called "anti-spam" policy is a joke.

    The only way to succeed in these "games" is to get the most clicks, and to accomplish this you have to spam your link through various sites. Also these sites tend to offer prizes as an incentive for people to play and spam.

    If they really wanted to kill spamming they would use a confirm system that only logs clicks after the link clicker registers to play. Of course that would greatly reduce the numbers of people clicking, viewing the site and its advertisements, would make it harder for the spammers to get anywhere, and pretty much kill the only fun thing about these so called games.

    That is why sites like this love the referral based system, and set them up in their favor. They like this because they are able to blame the spammer and claim no responsibility for the spam, while on the side encouraging and helping people to do this abuse. Other fun things they can do with a referral system is can claim that they killed a spammer, only to transfer them to a new account or kill it till the heat dies off. Most sites like this allow the spammer to sing back up without any problems. They can also chose to ignore the abuse reports and allow the spammer to keep at it.

    So it is easy to see why they do this, if they had to do confirmations through signups their game wouldn't last very long. The only way to get those clicks to their site and people to continue playing is by allowing spamming.

  • The first click counter game? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Web page hit counters aside, I remember having a similar game spammed in one of the board I frequently went to. Someone set up an account to post the link to a game just like the outwars one. This one involved vampires, you being bitten by one, becoming a vampire, and recruiting people through clicks.

    While things at first were not that bad, this particular poster kept spamming it, trying to hide the real intent of the link by claiming it was to something related to the site, and even signing up new accou

  • Spam Games (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JavaLord ( 680960 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @09:28AM (#10383175) Journal
    These spam games are utterly worthless. A friend asked me to play Kings of Chaos which works the same as outwar with her for a little while. She kept telling me "Try it, you will like it". Bascially, the more clicks you get on your link, the larger your "army" growns and you gain more gold. But you can only click the link once a day. Most of the players on there have "buddy click lists" and just sit around clicking each others links all day.

    Anyway, to make my army grow, I posted a few links here on slashdot, and also on the USENET. Within a day I had 800 soldiers (clicks) much to the amazment of my friend. I quit playing after that.

    Several people here on slashdot said they reported me, but my account was never cancelled, nor was I warned. These games are nothing but spam factories and they have no regard for their users spamming their links all over.

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