Amazing amazing stuff here mnem0!!
Congratulations on the win, and THANKYOU for this thread - its a gem!
I had a question im sure alot of people here would find helpful.
How fast did you aim to build up your bl's for your 7 sites - and for 'blackhattitude.blackhattitude.org'?
Thank you. Regarding bls :the more, the merrier ^^
I know with xrumer you don't really know how many posts are going to actually stick or not, but what bl numbers were you aiming for from the beginning of the contest?
i had bought xrumer few weeks before the contest and had seen that amounts of persisting links weren't very high. not something like 5000/day which could have warned googlebots. i hoped a maximum bl without being banned. i did know i could expect few hundreds/week, i hadn't more precise expectations.
I feel your numbers would give alot of us some piece of mind when blasting sites with tools like xrumer - knowing that we arent backlinking so hard we get sandboxed/banned.
if one understands how bots do work, he would try to think about content spinning and proxying. hundreds and hundreds of same spam messages are a sure way to get banned imho.
if you do think about a real buzz, getting massive amount of bl shouldn't necessary be considered as spam in googlebot's eyes. the problem here is : we get bl from same sources (phpbb, vbulletin, blogs) and that could be a clue indicating that we are spammers. On the other side, google simply can't blindly ban on this sole base : everyone could easily negative seo his competitors by "offering" them an xrumer blast
the other (and main imho) risk is a spam report from someone you over rank, resulting in being visited by a quality rater. reading quality rater guideline (as far as i know, only 2007 version is public and not by the willing of google

) would help avoiding being banned in such circumstances i guess.
to say it quick, i had a SWOT approach and it worked ^^