More Spam Controls, A Never Ending Battle
October 3rd, 2010velospace has been dealing with spammers since it first came online in 2005. Over the years I have written about some features and tools we use to manage this problem: moderation, comment throttling, marketplace throttling, rel=nofollow, and manual content reviews. Even with these tools, spam bots continue to hit the site with their full might.
The latest type of spam has been batch account creation with spammy user names and URLs in profiles. The spammers hoped to get credibility with search engines by having links on velospace pointing back to their websites. Even though all these links were tagged nofollow, the spammers still kept on creating new accounts. After thinking about the problem, I’ve gone ahead and removed webpages from user profiles; velospace users won’t be able to post their websites in their profiles. Any websites included in existing profiles won’t be displayed. There are also a few new behind-the-scenes features that will help deal with account spam, but I’m going to keep those details off the radar for the time being.
- Greg