m2bord's Journal: Spam hosting sites and images

It's a valid conclusion that I hate marketers period. They contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity and spend most of their lifetimes in pursuit of knowing what makes humans tick and how they can use that information to get you to buy a good or service.

And it has also been my longheld belief that marketers have ruined the web. If you think otherwise, I want you to think back on the very first spam message. It was sent by a law firm marketing itself to consumers to get a bigger share of the market.

That trend continues today except now it does not stop with just those attorneys. Now it covers drugs, magazine subscriptions, medications, and anything you can think of. If you ever venture over to CraigsList and peruse through the Business/commercial for sale area you will see scores of get rich quick schemes, credit come ons, MLM's, and a million other ways to seperate the fool (you) from your money (money).

And most of these posts do not have any text content. All text is displayed via a graphic since CraigsLists filters will block that text. These images are being posted from all image hosting sites: Photobucket, Flickr, Imagebucket, Picoodle. Most of these sites immediately react when one of these posts is brought to their attention.

One site that I have run across, Picoodle, does not take immediate action. Nope. Instead, they tell you that they will take up to three weeks to process your request. Think about that...three weeks; 21 days.

Meanwhile the spammer/malware purveyor/ne'er do well continues to violate the terms and conditions of the image hosting company.

Now Picoodle is part of the Funky Llama group of sites. The sites that this company hosts include a MySpace layout tool. So I have no doubt that their staff is stretched thin however, I believe that they have if they offer a service, they have a responsibility to the Internet community, just like every other image hoster, to act in a swift and responsible manner and not allow people accused of bad behavior to continue to reap profits from their behavior.

I have contacted Photobucket, Imageshack, Imagebucket, and Flickr previously regarding these types of posts and they responded within 36 hours just about everytime so I wonder here, why can't this hosting site be able to investigate and respond to these matters in a short time like the companies you would think they consider competition.