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Are Posterous Pages Potentially Dangerous?

Are Posterous Pages Potentially Dangerous?

Posterous (considered by some to be Tumblr’s biggest rival) is finally allowing users to create pages to accompany their blogs.

Unlike Tumblr however, Posterous is enabling fans of the service to add a few extra features to pages that may appeal to keep-it-simple bloggers, not to mention spammers as well.

We decided to use the same great editor that you are already using for posts. This means you can edit rich text, upload any media, and add and edit photo galleries. All of the cool features that we’ve created for posts—like link auto-expansion and syntax highlighting—come along for the ride with pages. […]

We allow you to create a page that redirects to a static URL. You may want to do this if you want to add a link to one of your social networks, or to a page tTo [sic] do this, simply click on the “Page Options” tab, and add a URL where it says “Redirect to:”. When your visitors click on a link to a redirect page, they will be redirected to the URL you specified. (Official Posterous Blog)

Although it’s great to see Posterous finally add pages (which is considered a standard feature in Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr), the page redirect feature is potentially dangerous as one could redirect a curious user towards a site filled with malware.

Perhaps Posterous could consider giving users about to be redirected a link to the actual site (similar to how Facebook warns users who are about to be redirected towards another site).

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Danger aside, the ability to add video to pages will appeal to bloggers deciding to explain themselves beyond text and images (without having to host the video upon YouTube).

Thus far Posterous is quickly emerging as a serious blog platform, although it remains to be seen whether the tiny startup can overtake Tumblr who seems to be the envy of the blog world (at least upon Typepad and WordPress).

View Comments (8)
  • Thanks for your concern over redirects! We are monitoring how people are using this new feature and are very concerned about spammy redirects.

    We’ll definitely adjust if we see it to be a problem.

    -Garry, cofounder, posterous.com

  • This sounds like a huge problem! It looks like Garry here seems a little bit concerned, so that’s a good sign. Thanks for this surprising information, I had NO idea.

  • I’m not sure I follow the concern, simply because this redirect trick could be used on almost any other platform available, including WordPress. So the danger is on par with any other blogging platform.

  • I do hope they create a feature that warns users that they’re about to be redirected, so they can choose to continue or not

  • After thinking about it some more, the ‘danger’ of ‘linking’ is really being a bit overstated here.

    The truth is, if someone creates a spammy or scammy site on Posterous, we’re going to ban them. That’s a much better solution than to degrade and ruin the experience for *everyone* just because a few people might possibly abuse the function.

    There is a rising tide of alarm in the media around very simple things that have *always* worked just fine. Linking is one. HTTP Referrers is another. These are normal, non-threatening, non-evil and critical parts of the World Wide Web. The web doesn’t work without these things.

    Lets not overreact to things that are normal and functioning parts of the Internet.

  • Is this post a joke? I honestly don’t see how this is any worse than a link? Is it dangerous that I can compose a link in notepad and post that notepad created page on my blog? I must be missing the April Fools note hidden someplace on this post.

    P.S. the Facebook redirect warning thing is a joke of a solution.

  • I guess Twitter must be the most dangerous site on the internet, with all those links going elsewhere! oh no!

    Come on guys, links are links. If a link takes you somewhere dangerous, then the site you were on was dangerous to begin with. Get over it.

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