We all know about the problem with spammers in the forums, especially people who join HP and begin promoting their wares and posting links within minutes of joining. Those issues have been discussed in the forums ad nauseum. Even though that problem does still crop up, it seems to be much better under control than it was several months back.
Then, not long ago, psycheskinner (mostly) and I (contributing) discovered a Hubber who had found an ingenious way to post a link - veritably hidden - within a forum thread. It was an image just one pixel high. It was truly invisible in the post; but when someone replied to the same post and quoted it, the html tags were revealed.
Now, a new puzzle has arisen. A brand-new Hubber who posted one-word, unrelated replies to threads. There is no visible link there; in quoting the post for a reply, there is no html that shows up.
What could be the purpose of a one-word, nonsensical post? What does the poster gain from it? There's no conversation or discussion. There are no Hubs that they might be trying to entice us to visit. There are no links on their profile to outside sites.
There must be a reason for these posts, and I doubt that it is for the benefit of HubPages.
I saw those posts earlier. I guess that person only wanted to draw attention, regardless of what type of attention was drawn.
Apparently, the person didn't bother to think before posting.
You're probably right. Some lonely person who has nothing much going on in life and wants to feel validated somehow.
But ever since that episode of finding the truly hidden links, I am ultra-skeptical! Wondering what else I'm missing!
Now, that's a very large thing to be wondering about. And, no I'm not going to get into it.
Hey! I'm someone who hasn't had much going on in my life for at least three weeks (waiting for a project to start and just found out it won't start for another week or so - and in the meantime, I still can't go on vacation somewhere).... and I'm not posting weird links places.
In all seriousness, I've had some very weird things go on with link-related stuff (and most recently, with the same site showing up on my own list of "most visited sites" as if I visited the site 900 times in one day (and 400-plus times the day before), when I didn't go there at all). This is a blog (and maybe a "sister blog", which coincidentally has the name, "Lisa", in it - might just be a coincidence, of course ) that once had a stretch of links to my Hubs, but that went to ads instead of my Hubs. When I made a big thing out of it, they first switched the links make them lead to my Hubs. Since then, I can't find my links, but if I search my name the blog still shows up. This wasn't the only weird thing, but it was the "most dramatic" one.
I've scanned (with latest updates) my machine for viruses, gotten a new version of Firefox, gotten rid of cookies, and whatever else I could think of. In the beginning it was only my Hubs. Eventually, it was other writing I have on other sites too.
I don't want to (and shouldn't) point any fingers, but really, the only place I go online where I'm as likely to frequently and regularly run into "iffy" people (or just strangers) is on here. I pretty much don't deal with/encounter strangers in what minimal other stuff I do online. I know scrapers can get stuff (I've had that too) whether you're on the site or not, but I've run into other weird stuff (like that blog thing).
If I'm on here in the future (I'm on here in recent days because I'm bored, and it's been - like - a million humid degrees out), I'm going to really watch what I click on. It's not guarantee, but, let's face it, some people just seem more trustworthy on here than others. (Maybe the moral to the story is: Just to be safe, stay away from one-worders, if nothing else. ) The other thing to stay away from (unless you're just in the mood to answer something and don't care if someone uses it somewhere else) is open-ended questions like, for example, "How would you create world peace?" That's different from the usual kind of discussion question like, "Do you think Obama did the right thing when .....". People come on here and find other people who might give good answers, and then they go post them on answer sites that pay the best answerers. Just thought I'd mention that as long as I was "mentioning" anyway. (Basically, that's why most people stay out of the forums, I guess.)
by Steve Andrews 12 years ago
I just checked my traffic and have 1030 views from Facebook in the last 7 days. I always share my new hubs there and I think you will agree from my latest traffic figures that it has been well worthwhile doing this!
by M. Halyard 15 years ago
Hello, my learned colleagues! I am new to this (posted a few hubs last night for the first time). I have been reading forums for several hours today, as well as a few interesting hubs (thank you, Mark Knowles), about blogging and creating links and adsense, and all kinds of intriguing stuff that I...
by Kate Swanson 12 years ago
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by stevemark122000 15 years ago
It is important to actually read the hub you are commenting on. It seems that every time I publish a hub I get at least one comment saying something that proves they didn't read the hub. In the future I will be deleting these comments even though they are well intentioned. It will better for your...
by Susannah Birch 8 years ago
I started on Hubpages back in 2010. The biggest lesson I learned here was to create each post as a single, stand alone, magazine style article. I took that lesson and applied it to my own sites. My main website now gets around 350,000 views/month. The problem is, I talk to "bloggers" in...
by Dorsi Diaz 16 years ago
I'm wondering who uses MySpace or other sites to promote your Hubs? And what is the best way to go about doing that?I got some success by sharing my hubs with friends the last couple days by email- but I'd really like to build a nice strong network and somehow tie it all together with my hubs here,...
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