amielleon:

ask-mirajane-strauss:

Please for the love of all that is holy DO NOT USE THIS TO PERSONALIZE YOUR TUMBLR. It’s covered in adware and every single time I click onto someone’s tumblr who has it I have to run my spybot and then it catches a bunch of stuff and in one case one of these addresses downloaded an adware program onto my computer that prevented me from hitting back on my browser and had loud popup ads now and then and annoying blue hyperlinks everywhere. It took several hours of my time to remove the darn thing from my computer completely.

“But I can have a cool personalized name with .co .vu!” Yeah, you know why? Because most people don’t use it so names aren’t taken. Why?

Because it’s covered in adware and spyware.

If you respect your followers AT ALL do not use this. Please.

This is actually a really fascinating scam.

So, you know how how “co.[country abbreviation]” is commonly used to signify that a site is from some country? For example, “amazon.co.jp” is the Japanese version of Amazon dot com.

The people selling “co.vu” sites want you to think that that’s what’s going on–that you’re getting nice good web addresses from Vanuatu.

But what’s actually happening is that they publish your sites as a subdomain of a site called “co” that is in Vanuatu.

In other words:

In the url “http://amielleon.tumblr.com”, “amielleon” is the subdomain, “tumblr” is the actual site, and “com” tells me that it’s a commercial site and probably from America.

In the url “http://mytrashyotp.co.vu”, “mytrashyotp” is the subdomain, “co” is the actual site, and “vu” indicates it’s from Vanuatu. But they WANT you to think that “mytrashyotp” is the site, and “co.vu” indicates that it’s a commercial site from Vanuatu.

What are they getting out of this? The ability to throw shit on top of your blog (like adware) and also leech off your content for search engine rankings.

(Source: I based this post off of this blog post which is somewhat more technical in nature.)