I book bands for a popular music festival in a major dairy producing state and every year, SonicBids contacts me looking for us to use their service to accept band submissions. The first year they contacted us, though I had read the bad reviews, I decided to have a look for myself so I signed up my band to test it out. The spam started immediately and was unrelenting. Now this should be all you really need to know as no legit business would spam folks and is an excellent indication of the kind of company you’re dealing with. Still, I spent a bit of time checking out SonicBids.

I was really being too nice to them… but it’s not all their fault, they’re only enabling the scam; promoters are allowing the scam. Let me cut to the chase: legit promoters don’t charge bands to submit themselves for a gig. Period.

But on top of that, the site just sucks. I mean, as a promoter, I couldn’t easily search through the bands on their site and find ones I’d be interested in hiring. Searching for genre was worthless, no good way to search by location, keywords didn’t return reasonable results, etc…. So I couldn’t and wouldn’t use their site to find an artist. Which makes it necessary to let the bands find me… which just happens to support their paradigm.

The icing on the cake was when the SonicBids recruiter called again (and they will hound you forever; they still call every year) and explained that “the submission process can be a revenue stream”. I told him we wouldn’t be using their service and cited the reasons above.

Long story only slightly longer: technology has made it easier than ever for musicians to market themselves (for free even) and promoters to find the bands that will make their events a success. If SonicBids actually cared about helping bands and promoters connect, they could use technology towards that goal but instead they used it to reinvent payola.

Now if you allow anyone to comment on you blog without being registered, you are clearly desperate for friends and should welcome these spammers with open arms (because you already are). If not and you’re still getting spam, then you need to turn off Trackbacks (Pings). Trackbacks are a nice little invention that was meant to enable communication between blogs. The premise is nice but the only folks that use it are spammers… so turn ‘em off. Here’s a little checklist:

1. Log into your WordPress Admin
2. Under Options/General check the box Users must be registered and logged in to comment
3. Under Options/Discussion, uncheck the option Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)

Okay, unfortunately, this will only protect your future posts… any existing post with pings enabled will still be targets. So you’ll need to either edit each post by hand and uncheck the “Allow Pings” (under Discussion section) or, if you’ve got access to your database, you can change them all with a single command. Now, before you do this or any edit on your database, make a backup of it! That said, here’s the command you’ll need to run (probably in phpmyadmin) to turn off pings on all of your posts:

UPDATE `posts` SET `ping_status` = 'closed';

Hope this helps and good luck.

Our shinny new host Bluehost.com not only has 10 times the space but also has reliable phone support and a long history (at least in host-years) of positive reviews. Oh, and it’s cheaper too. Yay me!

So let’s see how I feel about them in a year…

Billy “4 inches is average” Waggoner is a spammer and uses people’s domain names (including mine) for his reply-to address in his spam. This time he’s peddling penny stocks so if you want to lose a few pennies on companies who hire a spammer to promote their names, you should contact him. He can also hook you up with penis enlargement pills or viagra… or both… though I suggest you take the enlargement pills first.

William Waggoner
1021 Grey Hollow Ave
Las Vegas NV 89031
Phone: 702-657-9239
Phone: 702-642-9213

• Christina Applegate
• Joe DiMaggio
• John F. Kennedy Jr.
• Rock Hudson
• John Larroquette
• Ricardo Montalban
• Barbara and Jenna Bush

Oh, and also, Happy Gazpacho Soup Day too?

Feel free to add your comments…

Now with 100% less pictures… I quit smoking on July 3rd, 2005, though I haven’t remarked upon it till now (didn’t want to jinx it). But this is part of the reason for removing my lovely picture (I am pretty though). Since I had a cigarette in some of them, I figured why not loose them. I may put some new ones up but really… are you that interested in looking at me?

I’ve also added google ads to the site. They allow me to put a little money towards the costs of maintaining dasspunk.com. They’re really not bad at all and it’s interesting to me to see what various pages link to.

It’s still a work in progress so stay tuned… or not…

Billy runs a DNS server of his very own (currently called USAELENDER.COM) which he runs on a private IP address (192.168.51.51) thus making it difficult to complain to anyone about and have shut down.

Ahh… mortgages and viagra. I can’t get enough of either. Billy, your mother must be so proud. If you live in the area, please stop by Bill’s house and offer him your opinion on spam… and while you’re at it, please kick him in his tiny little balls. You can also give him a call…

William L. Waggoner
1021 Grey Hollow Ave
Las Vegas NV 89031
Phone: 702-657-9239
Phone: 702-642-9213