PhDTree.org: We don’t need another ResearchGate

On or about June 18, somebody had the bright idea of starting to spam addresses found in the PubMed for joining the PhDTree.org website. The spam is coming from the self-service ESP arm of RackSpace, Mailgun.

So we listed the IP address

Received: from z1.mailgun.us (z1.mailgun.us [104.130.96.1])

and the domain name phdtree.org. Perhaps we should sign up on the spamtraps’ behalf and contaminate the carefully curated database with as much crap from real invitees as we could bother.

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6384357, they say that

Anonymous editing is a real problem for Wikipedia. There are already numerous “edit wars” by anonymous editors – mostly on ideological/political issues, but also celebrity people changing articles about them to remove criticism, for example. These abuses/debates will likely continue to get worse. That’s why we at phdtree wiki project (http://phdtree.org/) don’t allow anonymous editing.

Free hint, guys: because you spam our traps, we have a significant number of possibilities for “legitimate” non-anonymous signups and editing.

2 thoughts on “PhDTree.org: We don’t need another ResearchGate

  1. Pingback: PhD Tree: The website that lets you see how incestuous research science is | DoctorAl

  2. RocketScientist Post author

    Added IP 166.78.70.239.

    Mailgun/Rackspace, free hint: Assign more IP addresses to these dweebs and we’ll just list the Mailgun service in its entirety.

    Reply

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