So I subscribe to MXNA, or AXNA, or whatever it’s being called these days. You know what I’m talking about:
So theoretically, Adobe is supposed to check out these feeds and ensure they are valid feeds, so we have a place to go to get real information from the Flash community. I’ve known people in the early days that were not approved for MXNA because they had too much non-Flash content on their sites, and others get pulled out of there for the same reason. But now it seems like the flood gates are open and anybody who mentions the word Flash on their site is A-OK.
First of all, there are over 2,000 feeds in there at this point, so it’s a bit overwhelming anyway. But I’ve noticed that there are certain sites that… I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but they are fake Flash sites just thrown up there to get traffic for other links. In recent weeks I’ve noticed a flurry of posts from these three sites:
goronaldgo [dot] net
foolsgoldflash [dot] net
flashnetwide [dot] com
Obviously I’m not going to link directly to them, but go check them out. Utter crap content. I mean, check this one out:
goronaldgo [dot] net/?p=128
How to draw a house in Flash. I mean… wtf??? Seriously. In case you don’t want to go there, I have to share this one:
That’s pure gold. I’m LMAO. This is categorized under “Flash Industry News”. And note that you ahve to register to leave comments. Don’t want any real comments coming in.
The other content on all three sites is a mix of AS1, AS2, stuff targetting Flash MX, MX 2004, Flash 8, a bit of AS3 / Flash CS3. I even saw something that used Flash 4 slash-syntax! On one site, half the articles were all posted on the same day. All of this stuff is obviously ripped off from old sites that probably don’t care any more. At least one of the articles I saw looked like it was pieced together from two different tutorials. It had you create a symbol with one id that was never used, and then use attachMovieClip with another id that was never mentioned.
Now if it was just crap content, ok, so what. But strewn throughout the site are these pseudo-articles like this:
This is strewn with links to various gambling sites. The other sites have similar articles with links to Costa Rican vacation sites. I checked out the whois info for all three sites, and they are all registered through godaddy.com via DomainsByProxy.com so you can’t see who really owns them. Wanna bet it’s the same guy?
Anyway, I could care less that this stuff is out there. If they make a buck off it, good for them. I actually admire the fact that they went out and found those house images and put words to them that almost make it seem like a useful article at first glance. My beef is that someone at Adobe is allowing these sites on the aggregator. Anyone who knows Flash could tell in 2 minutes that these sites are fake. Someone is not doing their job.
Keith,
Thanks for writing the post on how to draw a house in Flash. I was wondering if you could do another, this time showing how to add a gradient to the roof? Also, is there a way to make the drapes open and close with a button. Not the UI component button, but with a button on my keyboard? If I may suggest future postings… showing how to draw different types of houses would be cool. A Cape, maybe?
Lastly, for the upcoming Flash 4, I’d like to request Macromedia add a house symbol to the Common Libraries.
Hi Keith ….
there are alot of sites !! they add themselves to get benefit from higher pagerank 🙂
i have my own list 🙂
blog[dot]seo-egypt[dot]com
weblog[dot]jsoftj[dot]com
and really i thank you for opening this subject coz we love mxna – axna
kladofora[dot]wordpress[dot]com
blog[dot]paramegsoft[dot]com
thank you chuck. you can actually use the above tutorial to draw any type of house. for instance to draw a cape, just follow along through steps 1-8, but make it look more cape-like. see how easy?
as for animating on a button press, please see my upcoming tellTarget tutorial.
Along with these sites, we also have the sites that are blogging the posts already posted on MXNA. Visiting the blog, your greeted with a full page of google ad-words, and a link to the original article.
Agreed making a few $’s from the gold you posted above is acceptable and quite funny, but making cash from other peoples posts isn’t.
Al, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve complained about a couple of sites like that to Adobe as well. Looks like I may need to find a better aggregator if Adobe doesn’t start dong some quality control on this.
If you let us know about them : mxna@adobe.com
then they get removed.
We get about 200 submissions a day (most spam) and so some get through which shouldnt.
mike chambers
mesh@adobe.com
OMG, that building a house tutorial is hilarious!!!
@Mike
Shouldn’t Adobe be policing this better to begin with and not expecting people to be making as many submissions? 200+ a day seems like a lot, and I would agree that it would seem like somebody is not doing their job..
Although, I am bookmarking that building a house tutorial, I might need to develop those house building skills for my next gig 🙂
200 a day??? jeez. Maybe if there was some kind of “report this feed” button, it would make things easier. although i have reported a number of sites, it’s always a pain to get the url, copy and paste it into an email, find the address to send it to and then explain. then i feel bitter like i’m doing someone’s job. 🙂
Ha. Do not mock tellTarget(). Some of us still have to use it, on occasion …. 😉
On this note, there are also lots of feeds in the mobile and devices MXNA section from people that are not even doing Mobile and Device work.
It’s gotten to the point where it almost feels like twitter … a lot of “noise” in your vertical timeline for news.
Makes it harder to find the content that is relevant.
Good point. I love MXNA but do not subscribe to any RSS there because of this kind of rubbish. I rather pick interesing blogs from there and subscribe to them directly – but still MXNA is the nr 1 ressource to find good flash blogs.
On this occasion, it is worth mentioning this site: www [dot] sharingb [dot] com. They “borrow” content from others and put ads to make money on unconsious users who might click by accident. Lots of content, including all my posts – and they claim this site is “contributed by so many members”. Well, nobody asked me!
Aloha Bartek,
You could give website a try http://www.flashbookmarks.com, we try to keep it clean and interesting.
OK, opened my MXNA RSS feed this morning and in the last 15 items, at least two of them are NEW fake sites.
kathycreatesflash
strikeflash
Sorry Mike, but it took me under a minute to spot these in list of titles. someone is slipping up. I did report all of the ones i’ve found to mxna@adobe.com
btw, flashbookmarks.com is one of my top sources of traffic these days. thanks. 🙂
just checked it out, and I agree, FlashBookMarks.com seems like an excellent source… maybe they should help out adobe get their act together 🙂
Wow, 200 spam attempts a day… I knew it was big, but didn’t know that spammers imposed such a heavy administrative cost on the whole ecosystem. 🙁
But anyone can pull categorized aggregated feeds *out* of MXNA, and then perform additional filtering upon this, right? An AIR client or webpage which nuked bad bloggers out of your copy of the feed…?
jd/adobe
pretty much every time i check the rss feed, which lists the last 15 updates, I find at least 1-2 fake sites. this time:
kipnewlprograms
vonhalbert
it’s not a few slipping through, it’s a measurable percentage of the active feeds.
Agreed – http://www.flashbookmarks.com/ is the bomb.
I dunno. I still prefer the original and the best: Fullasagoog. http://fullasagoog.com/
btw, flashbookmarks.com is one of my top sources of traffic these days
@kp: glad to hear that, keep the good posts coming 🙂
Thanks for the fun!
It’s good to read a bit about bubble heads now and then.
It makes you feel smart and cosy 🙂