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

[JB Zurn]

Re #2, if there's a local consulting/custom manufacturing business, it's
easy enough to just refer them on. Then it doesn't even have to become a
discussion.
-Brooks Zurn

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Alan Fay <emptyset at freesideatlanta.org>
wrote:

> 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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>>
>>
>
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