Friday, August 14, 2009

Kaskus

Kaskus is an Indonesian internet forum site which is widely considered as the largest Indonesian online community. It ranks as the 10th most popular website in Indonesia and is one of two local sites in the top 10, positioning at 503th worldwide according to Alexa.com. It was established on November 6, 2000, by three Indonesian students (Andrew Darwis, RS, and BD) in the United States. As of April 30, 2009, Kaskus has more than 1,000,000 members. In August 2005 and September 2006, PC Magazine Indonesia voted Kaskus as The Best Indonesian communities twice (2005 & 2006). Registration is required for new users to participate in the community, and every registered member has the privilege to access more than twenty sub-forums on various subjects.

"KASKUS" is also an acronym from "KASak KUSuk" which translated to be "gossiping" in English. The administrator of the community chose this name so that when people are in a rush for a chat, they can go to Kaskus.

Kaskus has the following forums and sub-forums:
  • CAS-CIS-CUS, which is a forum where users can devolve with the current hot issues happening around the world.
  • LOE-KE-LOE, which is a forum where users can really find their suitable community based on hobbies, lifestyle and the likes.
  • FORUM JUAL BELI (FJB), perhaps one of the most active sub-forums in Kaskus, it is fast becoming the Indonesian Craigslist where members post pseudonymous ads selling (and looking for) everything from Rp 50.000 (±US$ 5) USB flash disks to Rp 150.000.000.000 (± US$ 150.000) land rights.

What is tagged.com

Tagged.com is a social networking site founded in 2004. Tagged is the subject of numerous customer complaints for sending deceptive bulk mail and is regarded as a phishing and spamming site and an "E-mail scam" by consumer anti-fraud advocates. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States.A TIME magazine article called Tagged "The World's Most Annoying Website". Tagged asks users for their email username and password, checks their email address books for contacts and repeatedly sends email invitations to people who are not yet on Tagged, stating that they have been "added as a friend" or that the inviter had sent them photos on Tagged. This process has drawn criticism in the technology press and from users. These emails were discussed as possible spam by Black Web 2.0. The resemblance to a virus has often been mentioned, including by urban legend site Snopes.com. The New York Times referred to the practice as "contact scraping"

My advice is don't sign up to it. Basically you sign up, enter your email and it grabs a list of email addresses of your friends in your contact list, you click next and it sends an email to every single one of those people telling them to sign up to tagged.com. Just like what happened to you. The best thing to do would just stick to myspace and not bug your friends with loads of tagged.com emails trying to get them to sign up. Block the domain for tagged as junk mail and it won't bother you any more. I think it does actually just automatically email you and harass you to join rather than your friends emailing you and asking you.