Sites, specially news-related or educational, usually cram their homepages with links to various sections and freshly updated pages. In that regards those homepages are portals into the rest of their respective sites where the real content resides.
That's all fine and good until they display links from those sections that the site maintains little control over. Forums, for example, are one these notorious areas trolled by spammers and jokers. The problem is that by nature they are supposed to be democratic. Pre-moderated forums generally suffer from anemic posts and little lively action. On the flip side, unmoderated or post-moderated forums spur real-time discussions, but invite nuisance posts.
This is depicted in the image grab from the homepage of devx.com, a development site frequented by programmers and, in this instance, linking to a prankster's or a spammer's post in one of their forums. The offending post was removed at some point, but the orphaned link remained on the homepage until it was pushed out by newer links.
homepages,forums,spam postsLabels: forums, spam posts
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Homepage Hazards>
// posted by rh
