"Farm" slang terms

[Mouse]

> [...] just recently I found a reference to "link farm" as meaning "an
> incremental backup consisting mostly of links (most likely hard
> links) to the relevant files in the preceding iteration of the
> backup"; but this page [...] says "a website with little or no
> content, consisting of mostly (or entirely) links to other websites."

I would say that, rather that specifically either of those, it is "a
collection of links to elsewhere and little else", where "link" is a
deliberately vague term.  In particular, I have heard/seen, and used,
it to refer to a directory containing symbolic links to elsewhere and
little/nothing else; my phrasing above is an attempt to capture the
common pattern behind these three uses.

No, I don't know anything significant about the history of any such
terms.  But you might want to look at the Jargon File
(http://www.catb.org/jargon/); it has three entries with "farm" in
their names, which you might be interested in.

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