College career-counseling offices that keep online lists of job opportunities are certainly doing their students a favor. But they may also be offering an unintended hand to advertisers who don’t feel any compunction about crashing an academic Web site, as officials at North Carolina State University have learned.
The officials recently noticed that a fake job posting — directing viewers to "various porn sites, ranging in everything from teen to celebrity to fetish porn," according to the Technician — had languished on their site for about a week. The posting, of course, has now been deleted.
Like many institutions, N.C. State lets employers post their own messages, with minimal screening, and warns students that the university cannot guarantee that any of the listed jobs are bona fide. There’s nothing unreasonable about that policy, but it can be exploited. What’s the signal-to-noise ratio on your college’s job-opportunities Web site? –Brock Read
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