Ok now this just pisses me off. I’m no prude and I don’t have a problem with people operating porn websites on the Internet in general. If people want to look at porn and are willing to hand over their cash to a website for the right to do so then that’s largely their decision. I do get annoyed with the more unethical porn webmasters who register domain names that are typos of legitimate sites in hopes of snagging bad typists into an endless cycle of popup ads to artificially inflate their page hit count to soak up money from the sites advertising with them. I also have a problem with porn sites sending tons of spam email to folks who haven’t asked for it. I’ve gotten used to the idea that this problem is one of those things that isn’t going to be solved easily and I’ll just have to learn to cope with it.

But who in their right mind honestly thinks it’s OK to go into a personal family website and post in the guestbook what is essentially an unsolicited porn advertisement? Oh, just in case you’re not interested in porn, they also sell radio pagers. You can imagine my surprise to take a glance at the guestbook I tossed onto the main page of our site here only to find an entry by someone named “Adult Toys” that only contained four links, the first three to websites dealing in “Adult Videos”, “Sex magazines” and “sex aids”. Plus the fourth link for “radio pagers”. A WHOIS search on the first three URLs turned up no record, but the search for call-systems.com (the link for the radio pagers site) turned up as being registered to a company named Call Systems Technology, Ltd the UK’s leading wireless call-system solution providers. A Mr. Andrew Birch () is listed as the technical contact for that website in Network Solutions registry listing and I think I’ll be dropping him a note asking why he felt the need to advertise his four sites in the guestbook of a family oriented website.

Personally, I was upset enough when I started getting spam with porn ads through my instant messaging programs (which is why I now have my ICQ, AOL, and Yahoo accounts set to the most strict settings when I used to allow anyone to contact me), but this is going too damned far. I mean, how big of an asshole do you have to be to pull a stunt like this? Grrrr..

Naturally it appears the admin portion for the free guestbook I was using is broken at the moment so I can’t even remove the entry yet. Time to switch to using my own GB script I suppose.

UPDATE 6/15/2005: Here we are almost three years later and I got an email from Mr. Adrew Birch today about this very entry. It seems he’s not happy with my associating him with the company that’s responsible for the spam left in the guestbook I had on the site at that time and he’s asked me to “correct” my article to name the proper person and gently chide me for not sending him an email about it, which I had done at the time just like I said I would. Never mind the fact that it’s taken him three years to figure out that I even wrote a complaint about it here on my blog or that it’s his own damned fault his named was associated with a disreputable client, it’s only important to him that I let you folks know that he’s not really responsible for the porn spam showing up in my guestbook. He claims the man most responsible is a Mr. Peter Hutchinson () which would have been really nice to know about three years ago, but I’m sure writing to him now to complain about something that happened three years ago isn’t going to be particularly productive.

So, there you have it. Mr. Adrew Birch is such a responsible fellow that he’ll get around to addressing your complaints about him in around three years or so time and he wants you all to know that just because he was dumb enough to attach his name to the URLs of the people who spam you he’s not at all to blame when you get spammed and someday he may even tell you who is responsible. Maybe.