User:Mr. Treasure Trove

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This is not an actual user page. It is merely a placeholder for records of the actions of several anonymous IPs who have engaged in various acts of self-promotion in Wikipedia. This page was created by User:Trilobite by analogy with the page that was created for User:Mr Treason.

Mr Treasure Trove was first spotted adding links to lots of articles which pointed to Amazon.com and were intended to make him money by means of referral credits. These were reverted as spam, but there may be more lying unnoticed in the bowels of Wikipedia. They contain the text "atreasustrove", so if you come across any, zap them.

Mr Treasure Trove also wrote the articles Michael Stadther, A Treasure's Trove and Quest4Treasure. The first was a textbook vanity article, replete with details of his thoughts and dreams as a child, what he gets up to in his spare time, and gushing praise of his magnum opus, the aforementioned book. The article on the book is similar in tone and needless to say, both articles are full of Amazon links.

I was going to list the articles for deletion, but it seems there are thousands of Google hits for both phrases, hence the need for further investigation. Now, look up the book on Amazon.com and you get this enlightening review:

The prose is clumsy and contains mistakes. As an example, at one point the author uses the word "want" when he means "wont." Any editor worth his salt would have caught this.
The illustrations are amateurish, with the misshapen facial features that characterize so many high-school art class portrait attempts. Characters are not recognizable from panel to panel (with the exception of the dog-moth, because of his short legs and wings.)
The layout and design of the book are blocky and distracting.
This book would never have been published by a reputable publishing house in this state. If not for the million-dollar gimmick and extensive marketing campaign, I doubt it would be getting any attention at all.
I do not subscribe to the adage that anything that gets parents and children reading together is necessarily a good book. If you want to share a well-illustrated puzzle book with your children, I recommend Graeme Base's Animalia or The Eleventh Hour. For older children and teens, The Egyptian Jukebox by Nick Bantock is excellent.

It's been given loads of 'helpful' votes, as has this one:

The real treasure in this book is the money that went in Stadther's pockets. I had really high hopes for this and was pretty disappointed in it. As a children's book it is fairly mediocre. There is really nothing outstanding in the plot or prose and the illustrations are amateurish. Concerning the treasure hunt itself, the book has clues like "above earth and under sky, a golden token you may spy" hidden in the margins. Cute, but it doesn't help much. I had really planned for my child and I to read this book and then have a wonderful time planning our treasure hunt. Unless Stadther starts to drop some really helpful clues on the website, I doubt anyone will find any of the treasures. If the book is really full of clues then whoever finds the tokens will be an employee of NSA or something. This leaves me to ponder if the treasures were really meant to be found or are they just a gimmick to sell an otherwise unremarkable book. If you do plan to pursue this, keep in mind that, along with the clues in the book, you will also have to have a great amount of free time just to search endlessly for the tokens. The accompanying "Puzzle Book Companion" is an equal waste of time. My advice is to save the 20 bucks or so you would have spent on this treasure hunt and take your kid to a movie or out for ice cream, you will find it more valuable.

There are also a couple of fairly obviously made up positive reviews written on the same day by people for whom it was their first Amazon review.

It would appear from all this that the book is some kind of vanity publishing exercise, or (and I wouldn't want to make this allegation without evidence, but it's worth speculating about) the guy is a simple con-artist who has made up a load of "treasures" that no one will ever find, and is now trying to scam people via Wikipedia as well. Look at the book info that Amazon provides and you'll see it's published by "Treasure Trove, Inc.". Go to their website and the contact address is a P.O. Box (i.e. probably just the guy's house) in a place called Pound Ridge, New York. One of the IPs used to edit Wikipedia traces to Hicksville, also in New York State, and another to Groton, Connecticut, about 80 miles away from Pound Ridge by my very brief look at a map of the area.

Finally there's this interesting snippet from the Treasure Trove site:

Q. Where can I get a book? Why doesn't my book store have any?
A. The books should be available in all major book stores, here at atreasurestrove.com, Amazon.com (be sure to check the seller treasuretroveamazon for 1-2 day shipping), barnesandnoble.co , and over the phone at 800-687-2972.

So, I've taken inspiration from the great Mr Stadther and done some detective work of my own. This is what I've been able to put together over the course of a matter of minutes. It seems that for someone who sets such hard puzzles for his readers he makes it remarkably easy for anyone to follow his tracks in his efforts to make lots of money. I've leave this to others to see what they think. (My thanks to other Wikipedians (discussions copied below) who have looked into this.) Oh, did I mention that he's vandalised people's user pages as well? Personally I would delete the articles on the book and its author and revert this guy on sight. I'm interested to hear other people's opinions.

— Trilobite (Talk) 03:24, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

IPs known to have been used so far:

From the help desk:

Hi,
User at IP 192.77.198.11 (talk · contributions) has been adding a lot of Amazon.com links to various pages. Is that allowed? I was going to revert all of them because they seemed out of place and spam-like, but I wasn't sure if the user was actually violating any rule. Thanks, -Deadcorpse 18:21, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)

There's certainly no need to add links to amazon for books, as the ISBN mechanism works much better, linking to Amazon and numerous other bookstores; so for books the amazon links should certainly be removed. It's a bit harder for computer games and music, as these don't have ISBN or an equivalent number. I don't know how to read amazon link, but we've had cases before where someone adds links in that feeds money into their personal amazon-affiliates program. Frankly I think links should be removed too - users are perfectly capable of finding music etc. themselves, without a link to a specific vendor. And as we don't take advertising or sponsorship, we shouldn't be doing so de facto by prefering a specific online vendor. Nuke em all. -- John Fader (talk | contribs) 18:34, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hum. I think those links have a referrer ID in them - the "&tag=atreasustrove-20" part - but I'm not sure; even so, they're not much use, as they in many cases link to a search for the item rather than the item itself. I think "nuke 'em" seems sensible. Shimgray 19:17, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

As I looked through more of his posts I found that he is probably trying to make money through the referrals like you said. The referrer ID you mentioned has the word "treasustrove" in it, and this user posted a bio (w/ amazon links) of an author (most likely himself) who wrote a book with "treasure trove" in the title. On top of that, I found a user 192.77.198.12 (talk · contributions), whose IP is one digit away and who also adds the same spam to articles. I'm no expert on IP addresses, but I bet it's coming from a related computer, like from the same household or business. There are too many contributions for me to go through now, and Wikipedia is running slow, so is there somewhere else I can post this to get people to help remove the extensive spam? -Deadcorpse 20:50, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)

WP:VIP, and mention that you need help cleaning up his spamcrap. -- John Fader (talk | contribs) 21:04, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've removed what spam I could find from those two IP addresses, but there may be more lurking. — Trilobite (Talk) 22:55, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • Yep, I totally agree. Links to a specific vendor of anything, be it Amazon or another company, should be removed. Wikipedia shouldn't be used for personal referal links. And we don't support any specific business so we shouldn't make it look like it by linking to them. Mgm|(talk) 00:55, Mar 26, 2005 (UTC)

From vandalism in progress:

  • 192.77.198.11 (talk · contributions)
    • Has added links to amazon.com in many articles, presumably to earn referral credit. Has been told to stop, and seems to have complied, but I need help removing the extensive spam from their contributions. Also note that user with similar IP 192.77.198.12 (talk · contributions) has done the same, and spam from that user should be removed too. -Deadcorpse 22:36, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)
      • See also the discussion at Wikipedia:Help desk#Amazon_Links. I've removed what spam I could find but it's possible that there's more somewhere. I believe there is a blacklist of some kind that prevents known spammers from adding certain links - you get an error message if you try to save an article with such a link in it. I don't know who can edit this list, whether it's admins or just developers, but if anyone who sees this has the ability it might be worth adding amazon links containing the string "atreasustrove" to it if that's technically possible. This person is even creating articles on non-notable reality TV contestants consisting of a single sentence plus a link to the DVD of the series. There may be other IP addresses involved. — Trilobite (Talk) 23:00, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • I noticed that 68.196.56.36 (talk · contributions) has been suspiciously editing some of the same articles that the above users were editing, and this user has vandalized mine and others' talk pages. I don't know if it's the same person, but I would bet that it is. Who else would obsesively edit a page called A Treasure's Trove?

(I've pre-emptively registered this username, just in case.)

My two cents: the book is indeed self-published ("Publisher: Treasure Trove, Inc. (December 1, 2004)", from Amazon [1]), but it amazingly enough has a sales rank of #153, so I suppose A Treasure's Trove should be kept and debunked, as much as it hurts me to say so. Michael Stadther and Quest4Treasure are pretty clearly vanity. —Korath (Talk) 04:06, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

I also wondered about keeping the article and doing some kind of debunking. Like you I saw the sales rank and thought it was incredibly high for a self-published book. — Trilobite (Talk) 04:35, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I was looking at the author's website again and noticed that the WP bio on Michael Stadther is copied verbatim from here. This must be a copyright violation, but I'm not experienced enough here to know how to deal with that stuff, so maybe one of you can handle it. Also, be on the lookout for other parts of the website that may have been lifted for use in other articles. I'd also like to point out that the author has apparently gotten a lot of attention for this book and has even been on the Today Show. After browsing his site, I now believe this treasure hunt deal is on the up-and-up. I'm still not convinced the author is the spammer here. --Deadcorpse 07:51, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] He also made Survivor stubs

Should I individually VfD each of the endless, annoying articles he created on various Survivor cast members? He clearly created them just to stick in his amazon link. The articles are stubs right now, but I'm not sure they should exist at all. Imagine if every contestant on Jeopardy had their own article. -- Deadcorpse (Talk) 05:42, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] For everyone's information

I'm new to posting here, so please forgive me if I don't use the proper etiquette, terminology or proceedures. But, I just had to step in and comment on what happened here! Quest4Treasure, Michael Stadther and 'A Treasure's Trove' had nothing to do with the articles that were posted, pertaining to them. I doubt they even knew about them. I know the one individual who did post all 3 of them, along with many more on several other sites. The reason is obvious. He'll post anything to get his Amazon link publicized, to get credit for purchases there. I know this for a fact! I have a high respect for all 3 of these now deleted topics. It's a shame the guy who instigated this problem, for his own selfish gain, isn't man enough to admit it and clear the muddy water he has created! If it's necessary to know his email addresses and/or real name, please email me. I'll be happy to share all the details, and help in any way I can to clear Quest4Treasure, Michael Stadther and 'A Treasure's Trove', and put the blame where it belongs. For now, I suggest deleting all articles containing 'atreasustrove'. Thank you!