Textpattern Support Forum

rel=follow is the “default”.

Thing is: Spammers spam. That’s what they do for a living.

They spam no matter whether it helps them or doesn’t do anything good at all, because mindlessly spamming everything which looks like a place to drop some links is cheaper than researching their spam target beforehand for rel= attributes and robots.txt exclusions and whatnot.

We will probably have to live with them, as this is the world Google gave us.

The forum I installed for my WoW Guild has 1,308 members, which is pretty amazing because only 2-3 of the 15-20 active members post regularly.

We don’t have a problem with posts so much as stuffing links in the profiles. I am rather disappointed in the forum software.

wet wrote:

We will probably have to live with [spammers], as this is the world Google gave us.

Spammers will always exist, sure. But we don’t have to tolerate the software. Or more to the point, do everything through this forum.

In just the threads that I follow, spam post frequency already outnumbers that of regular posts. That’s bad.

I did offer two cents on a sensible course of action (moving content out). Fighting spam in fewer threads is certainly a step in the right direction (not to mention it’s the smart thing to do anyway). Granted that means troops need to rally on several fronts — .com, .org, .net… — but it would pay off in more ways than one.

I think holding off on TXP 5 to get the mothership and platforms in order is a wise move, frankly.

colak wrote:

All we need is a script to block them.

I’m relieved to know the solution is apparently just 10 minutes work away. So who’s got the magic script, already?

colak wrote:

If someone can adapt it for this one, we are close to solving the current problem.

It helps to some degree, blocks the totally mindless bots. It has the same feature set as my rah_comment_spam plugin for Textpattern. But as with rah_comment_spam, it will also potentially effect us, the real users.

Altho, for the time being the forum doesn’t get that much new real users, so if there were that sort of anti-spam plugin — link count, duplicate post block feature (that’s what that plugin is too) — and it was limited to users with low rank (time/post count), we could be pretty okay in minimizing the side effects.