Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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Corpse Spam

File Under: Spammers are really smart (and funny).

So apparently in World of Warcraft you can’t spam people with commercial messages or you get kicked off. However, there is a lot of money in selling gold to players and there are a bunch of sites that competing to sell it to you. So their solution, as Seamus at Virtual Economics explains is to arrange a bunch of dead bodies in the game to spell out their URL:

Go to any major city (Stormwind, Orgrimmar) and you’ll see the name of some gold-selling website or other spelled out in dead bodies on the ground. Now, it’s quite hard to spell out URLs in dead bodies (it takes several corpses, hence player accounts that you have to hack from somewhere – to spell out each one) so the big trick is to get a URL that is short, ideally memorable and above all easy to spell out in the dead bodies of WoW avatars.

November 15, 2009