Taking down alphainventions
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I’ve recently been exposed to this viral idea known as alphainventions, the purpose of which as far as I can tell is so some half-wit web programmer can claim to be a genius by increasing traffic to everyone’s web site instantaneously.
Well it’s a joke. He can’t even explain what it does in less than 2000 words, and his description of it is a roundabout, avoiding-the-topic kind of explanation. (see http://alphainventions.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/alpha-inventions/)
For those who want the gist of it, it’s just a web page (alphainventions.com) that reads new post data from blog servers like WordPress, and rotates a frame every 5 seconds to load those new posts, giving them “hits” as soon as they’re published. Oh, and it gives higher priority to web sites that link back and mention alphainventions.com (does anyone else smell that?)
The problem is that flashing a web page for 5 seconds does not constitute a hit, because the page barely has (and in fact in many cases doesn’t have) enough time to even load, let alone be digested by a reader who is supposedly watching this all take place with some interest in random blogs flashing before their eyes.
While I admit there is a certain fascination with this instant randomness, I do not appreciate my blog’s stats being polluted with hits that are essentially meaningless. His about page is plastered with praise about how his “wonderful” invention increased the number of hits to everyone’s blog, but people wake up, these are not REAL hits! In fact they’re not hits at all in the sense that a hit implies someone has actually willingly come to your blog with the intent of actually reading it.
I would like to prevent alphainventions.com from ever displaying my blog.
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You”l need contact the web owner to have your website removed
from their site. http://alphainventions.com/contact -
If you’re not convinced, here’s a little more evidence this is a scam: I’m in the process of starting up a blook (blog-based book) and just posted the beginning of my second chapter. Within minutes I had 17 hits on chapter 2 and thought “great!”, until I realized that out of those 17 hits, ZERO of them bothered to click through to the beginning of the book.
Who starts reading a book at chapter 2??
The point is the hits that are being “generated” by alphainventions are totally bogus and I consider this abuse of the WordPress stats engine, plain and simple, and it should be dealt with as such.
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Although I’ve never “used” alphainventions, I see where you’re coming from. A hit is indeed meaningless when the user/visitor doesn’t even spend more than 30 seconds on your site/blog making your bounce rate really high.
Don’t know if you have, but try contacting the guy and ask him to remove your blog from his DB?
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@teck07, devblog: I am not complaining just for my own sake, but for the sake of the community, many of whom it appears have been duped. I do not consider this fair use and am lobbying for some kind of action to be taken by WordPress, and am looking for additional support. I feel this scam needs to be dealt with, and the author made well aware his toy project is not appreciated nor welcome on WordPress servers.
At the very least, I want to help educate people on what this “invention” really is, because I have a feeling the author screens all comments posted to his blog.
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I also am not thrilled about the idea of sending this guy an email when I clearly do not trust him.
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If you won’t even email him and ask to be removed (and he’s cooperated with everyone I know of who’s done that) then your blog is going to continue to be featured by him. Which is worse from your perspective? Unless you’ve got a virtual assistant, you’re on your own when dealing with third-party sites.
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It’s an abuse of my blog, and I don’t like having to deal with this myself, nor do I like the thought that everyone else out there has to deal with this themselves. WordPress is supposed to be on the side of the bloggers.
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I look at alphainventions in a different light. Those 5 seconds your page is flashed can cause some one who is looking to maybe want to stop and actually check out your whole page from a little thing they saw.
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It’s not even technically feasible, jbrown. I tried it. You can’t reverse the flow and you have about 2 or 3 seconds to hit the pause button or else you lose the blog. How can you read enough of a blog in 5 seconds and still have time to pause the application?
But that’s not the biggest problem. I’m not against the concept, poorly implemented as it is. I’m against the fact that this guy was able to “feature” my blog without my permission, and is doing so to countless other blogs all over the web.
I should NOT have to opt-out from every ill-conceived web application some high school student in the states whips up.
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I’ve never understood the benefit we’re getting from alphainventions. The hits it generates are meaningless, but so what? I’m not aware of any harm it does either, so I just shrug it off.
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I find the idea of Alphainventions to be sleazy and deceptive, or at very least misguided, but as others have suggested, you need to email the site owner and ask to be removed. Other than that, you’re pretty much at the mercy of every “high school student in the states” who whips up some similar idea if you have a public blog. Same goes for comment spammers and RSS feed scrapers. It’s too bad that there are people like this out there, but at least they seem to be a tiny minority.
Should we take this more seriously? I suspect that both Google and WordPress will react poorly to this kind of artificial inflation of hit stats and will take steps that will solve the problem. WordPress could block all access where the referrer is alphainventions.com, for example, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort or CPU cycles.
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Fair enough. I guess at the very least I would like to see some easy way of “disabling” certain sites, or at least excluding them from the statistics gathering.
I’m glad at least there is someone out there who sees this my way. I admit I may have overreacted.
For now I will hope that others eventually come to the same realization and maybe WordPress will give us the ability to blacklist certain sites from the statistics if nothing else.
Cheers.
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I really also don’t like that it inflated my blog stats. I got all excited until I realized what it was. What a let down!
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Not to be naive, but how would one know if one’s blog was “featured” on alphainventions?
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