[hackerspaces] So, how much spam do you get?

[Alan Fay]

It comes with the territory of being a public space.  Freeside gets four
distinct types of spam (aside from your typical email spam):

0. "Can you advertise my [product, service, website, kickstarter] to your
members?"  Really, what these folks want is an endorsement.  We have an
open public mailing list that gets this sort of thing from time-to-time,
but they are after is our credibility and access to our platform to sell
our members or social media audience on something.

1. "I have an idea but I need a team of people to work for little to no
compensation to execute it for me.  Can you help?"  A similar flavor, this
person wants to sell us on an idea and get us to recruit on their behalf,
for free.

2. "Are your members interested in [paying to attend, or managing and
hosting (for free)] a hackathon?"  Companies now use hackathons to spot and
recruit talent, and perhaps even manage to develop the start of something
with free labor.  So they're looking for everything: credibility, access,
and recruitment - for free.

3. "Can I use your space as a venue for [something unrelated, exploitative,
or weird], for free?"  Our goto example of this is that we've received not
less than three (yes, 3!) separate requests to host children's puppet shows
at the space.  Other requests include time-share presentation variants,
shooting rap videos, repairing air bags workshop...

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 10:19 AM, Nathaniel Bezanson <myself at telcodata.us>
wrote:

> We get/got a LOT of maker-targeted spam to our contact address. Once in a
> while, the spammers wouldn't understand BCC, and we'd get a look at the
> address list: All hackerspace contact emails. I finally realized that these
> folks were just scraping addresses from the hackerspaces.org wiki.
>
> I finally went and changed the contact address on our entry, and the
> volume seems to have fallen off quite sharply. A real human trying to
> contact us should figure it out in no time. But I wonder whether anyone
> else has taken this step, and how many more will be pushed to do so, and
> what this suggests for the future of the resource.
>
> -Nate B-
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
> http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
>
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