Bizarre, but why?
I needed a real-time data feed to test the my SOAP API code, so I connected to
LJ's real-time stream*.
This worked really well, handing me chunks of XML describing whatever postings were occurring at the moment,
and let me test my message processing software nicely.
However, I noticed something weird. More than a third of the postings were in random-looking journals, consisting of great piles of links to other random-looking journals, along with some throwaway text (example here).
This must produce a fair amount of load on the LJ servers, but I can't figure out why anyone would bother creating a bunch of random journals, and then massively post links between them. Strange DoS attack? Google link-stuffing? Spammer whitening?
Should I report this to LJ?
* http://atom.services.livejournal.com/atom-stream.xml
Details on XML (and other) feeds here.
However, I noticed something weird. More than a third of the postings were in random-looking journals, consisting of great piles of links to other random-looking journals, along with some throwaway text (example here).
This must produce a fair amount of load on the LJ servers, but I can't figure out why anyone would bother creating a bunch of random journals, and then massively post links between them. Strange DoS attack? Google link-stuffing? Spammer whitening?
Should I report this to LJ?
* http://atom.services.livejournal.com/atom-stream.xml
Details on XML (and other) feeds here.