Automated Income? Think Again…

Last summer I stopped writing about my ideas at a site called P31.com, my Penny Thirty One Project, and switched over to the Rich Sage. The site was left alone with a WordPress installation, regular site that I’ve linked to and a forum.

The forum was “picked up” by a network of spammers that posted automated forum postings of various kinds. The predominant content was for porn and drugs that enhance mainly male performance. The stats were impressive: Nearly 20,000 registered users who had posted around 55,000 posts! Most webmasters would love to have that kind of forum running in less than a year.

My original idea running the P31.COM site was to take one penny (USD$0.01) and double it thirty one times. B>) That may sound funny, but if you do the math, you’ll end up with $10,737,418.24 –a number that I remember by heart!

Keep reading to learn about the darkside of automated income…

I am now in the midst of setting up the next generation of the site which will feature pay per action ads (PPA), pay per click ads (PPC) and my own ad network consisting of mainly CPM ads (Cost per 1,000 impressions) and PPA ads. The goal remains the same, but the income generated from the site will go to the charity setup by my network. The project and site is very much alive and will go on in a new format…

Then I started to look at the individual posts and found the “darkside” of automated income.

Many of the forum posts were:

• Questionable business ideas and practices –None that I’d want to associate myself with.
• Lots of drug posts — I suspect that these posts were “riding” on the porn posts to get traffic and exposure.
• Lastly, most of the posts were porn related with pictures — I am not against pornography, but some of the pictures looked like they were kids in sex acts.  I am against that.

The immediate question that I asked myself was this: “Am I hosting child porn files?” Well, I didn’t even wait to answer that question. I immediately deleted the forum and all the files associated with the entire installation. Some of the text in the forum posts are in a database, and as soon as I isolate which database, I’ll delete that too.  The most alarming files were in a “images” folder that contained all types of images.  That was vaporized.

My next task is to contact my host and make sure that the files are deleted from any back up area.  I have a daily back up of all of my sites, content and databases.  I need to make sure that back up files with this content is wiped out.

The reason that I bring this up is too fold:

• It’s rather easy to look at the traffic that is generated and become seduced by the stats. After all, who would not like stats like this? Below are stats going back a year for P31.COM, and while these look impressive, the search engine traffic was very minimal. I’d say less than ten visitors per day from searches. Most of the traffic generated was coming from a spam network that was posting automated content.
• 
• The next problem that you’ll face is the fact that you might be hosting illegal content without even knowing about it. If you have a website with a forum or just a forum running as a site, and you’ve abandoned it, take special care to erase content or even disable the forum. Otherwise, savvy marketers will hijack the forum and post content that you’ll regret having!

Good luck explaining to the authorities after the fact that you had no idea what was happening. Better yet, take a precaution or two and disable any forum that is getting automated posts that most of the time contain porn and online drug sales.  If you leave such a setup, especially using a forum program that cannot block spam, you’re just asking for problems!

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

Carpe Diem,
Rich Sage