RE: Scheme Cookbook spam

King Doug wrote:
> What's to stop the spammers from automating their answers, by parsing the
> challenge, putting the snippet through a command-line Scheme, and sending
> back the answer?

Mainly that very few spammers care about any individual site - if they run
into something that makes signup more difficult for them, they're most
likely just to drop it, assuming they even notice the failure, which they
might not if they're using a script to spam.

> All these sorts of things are merely entering into an "arms race"
> with the spammers, and annoying potential users.

I doubt that anything we do on the Cookbook alone would create an arms race.
It's much easier to protect a single site against these things than e.g. all
TWiki wikis, since any solution that applies to many sites will be worth a
spammer's while to crack.

Obviously we don't want to annoy potential users.  I was hoping that a
simple enough question wouldn't do that.  Like: what's (cons 1 2) ?

> One thought about a solution: modify the wiki code to not render URLs as
> links, except for a certain, maybe small, whitelisted set of domains.  SOE
> spammers would get no benefit from spamming the site, and users would only
> be inconvenienced by occasionally having to post a URL to their
> address bar.

Something like this, or the "nofollow" solution that's been mentioned, is
probably worth doing.  But while that can definitely help global search
engine health, it doesn't necessarily prevent automated spamming, since the
spammers may not even notice it's happening - we'd just be one more twiki
site on their list.

Anton



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