tobias schlitt 
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Abject "sponsored link" practice on PHPFreaks (update)
Update (Jan 17th 2005, 13:45):
Many people replied to my article, so I feel I should post an update. Thanks for everyone who stated his opinion so far.
Today I saw that phpfreaks.com actually changed the links on the word PHP to point to their start page and now link the word hosting to their webspace provider. At least, this does not harm my PHP evangelism feelings that much anymore. Anyway, the difference between ad and content is still not clear at all. Pretty many people (compared to the usual comment traffic on my blog) already claimed their support against this kind of ads here.
Most funnily phpfreaks.com even aggregated this article through an indirection of phpdeveloper.org. While I like getting aggregated on sites like phpdeveloper.org, planet-php.net and so on quite much, I strongly discourage that my content is reused by this phpfreaks page. Sorry guys, I do not permit you any longer to use my words for your advertisements.
Do you have an opinion on this? Please leave a comment here!
Original (Jan 12th 2005, 19:06):
As Vidyut pointed out, phpfreaks.com seems to automatically create a link everywhere on their website, where the word "PHP" appears. They do this even in user comments. Apparently this seems to be a nice service, if the link would direct you to php.net (or maybe some explaination page or something). But instead they link to some hosting provider which supports PHP (what also well known as a "sponsored link").
I have to admit that this is one of the largest brazennesses I every saw. Beside that, it's absolutely frowned upon in journalism circles (even the famous German "Bild-Zeitung" does not do advertisment in such a abject way, also they are wellknown for borderlining adverts) and in many states even completly illegal.
You should really feel ashame, you strange PHPFreaks!