Additional Anti-Spam Measures
On suggestion from the velospace bicycle community I added another anti-spam measure tonight:
New users must wait 15 days before posting sales.
15 days may seem like a long time, but with nearly 25,000 members velospace has grown leaps and bounds over the past few years. In order to cut down on spammers and scammers the quarantine on posting sales should cut back on fraudulent posts in the velospace used bike marketplace.
This measure, combined with the 60 second comment delay put in place in April 2009 are both useful tools in the fight against the barbarians at the gate. Next up is throttling user account creation by the same IP. Some spammers will create 15-20 accounts in a row with spam URLs in the profiles to try and get some extra Google juice. What they haven’t recognized is that all the URLs are nofollow so the links are meaningless… but tell that to an automated spambot and you don’t get much in return!
If you have any suggestions, as always, please contact me.
- Greg