Nucite Network

I mentioned in a previous post that due to foobar being a common placeholder name, there are a ton of daily emails sent to the address foo@bar.com.  The fact is, due to that same situation, there are also a number of inbound links to both bar.com/foo and foo.bar.com.  Most of these are coming in from forum posts where programmers are communicating concepts with one another.  I threw up a simple page that asked "What were you expecting to see here?" along with a Google AdSense search box at foo.bar.com.  I also redirected traffic from bar.com/foo to the same spot.  I really just wanted to see how much traffic it actually got... and where the traffic was coming from.  Turns out, not a big deal.  About 5 - 10 people a day were coming through to those 2 URLs.

The owner of Bar.com and I talked about the email situation and he told me the brief story of the foo, which has recently replaced the simple search page.  Because most programmer geeks would probably find it interesting (or at least mildly entertaining), we did a Digg and a Reddit for the new page.  The Digg got absolutely no traction, but the Reddit took off fast and landed a link on the home page there for about an hour.  And it was at the top of the Geek category there for just over a day.  There was a 24 hour time period there where that domain got about 5,000 unique visitors.  And since that day, we're now averaging about 50 visitors to that page.

I made this post just to communicate how much of an impact a simple post to these social bookmarking-type services can have.  Now if we could only do the same for the money making pages...

Shortly after launching a developed version of Bar.com I quickly noticed that the server itself was slowing down rapidly.  It was working overtime... on something.  The first thing I did was check some analytics to see just how much traffic the web site was getting.  It was pretty normal.  Then I checked some server logs and quickly realized the problem.

Do you know what foo or foobar means?  I don't mean the college term relating to a state of drunkenness... that one's spelled a bit differently.  It's kind of difficult to put into lay terms, but for our purposes here, it's a term programmers use when they're trying to communicate (via text) how a certain concept is conveyed through code (well, basically that's what it means... like I said, tough to explain).

Before I get back to foobar, let's talk about SPAM for a minute.  Chances are that you've heard spam bots go out and search for email addresses on web pages so that they can spam the hell out of that address.  Right?  Okay, back to foobar...

As programmers are trying to communicate to on another over the Internet via forums, newsgroups, etc, they sometimes use the email address foo@bar.com to convey their concept.  Google shows about 76,000 web pages that show that email address.

No wonder the server slowed down.  It was getting an average of a few emails per second to that address.  All, of course, were obvious spam.  Imagine if your email address was plastered all over 76,000 web sites.