Just saw that Wordpress is spamming and got banned from Google. I use WordPress for this blog, but was rather surprised to find that they were so blatant about it.
I also noticed that phpnuke.org also appears to be spamming — they have (or at least had) a number of phantom hosts, like insurance4u.phpnuke.org, which were clear spam.
What kinda concerns me here isn’t that some people spammed… there’s lots of people that spam. But it’s that popular open source is seeing spam as a way to make money… I mean, that’s just bad. Effectively, what it does is cause a pretty big side of a community to suddenly shift and kill one of their own.
I’m not sure now what will happen to WordPress…. I’ll be interested to see what happens when a star hacker (as is Matt, the guy who wrote all this software) gets nailed pulling a stunt like this. Maybe people will leave? Or perhaps take out links back to the main site? Or perhaps they’ll do nothing…