Naughty Neo

Being an Adult webmaster, I am a regular at Netpond, a popular adult webmaster forum. Netpond is one of the busiest webmaster forum with thousands of webmasters posting everyday. But when I checked the site today, I saw this big message on black background. Netpond is hacked!! Here is a screen shot of what I saw.

Edit: Netpond is back to normal now.
At first I was surprised, because I know netpond is on cyberwurx servers and uses vbulletin and I have only heard good things about them. But after taking a second look at the site, I understood that it wasn’t really hacked. They are updating their VBulletin to a new version and the whole hacked thing was joke. I spoke to some of my adult webmaster friends and confirmed this.
Now, what netpond did is a classic form of link baiting. Being a very popular forum especially related webmasters, thousands of webmasters would have noticed this and many like me will write about this in their blog. This will bring in hundreds of links to them in couple of days. Being offline for a day will cost netpond a lot of money. But this is something which they can’t avoid in case of a database error or a major maintenance. But instead of just keeping it offline, netpond crew decided to utilize the opportunity to bring in more incoming links through link baiting.
This type of link baiting may not work for a new site. But if you have lot of regular traffic especially webmaster traffic, you might want to consider this form of link baiting when you do a server maintenance or moving your servers.