4 ms·

Links under a certain karma threshold are marked nofollow. I think the criteria is 4 or 5 karma.

• _delirium 16y ago
  Doesn't seem to deter a large proportion of spammers, either--- I guess spamming is cheap enough that you might as well shotgun it, instead of bothering to research each site's nofollow policies. If you ever look at Slashdot's submission queue, there's a ton of spam in there too, despite the fact that it gets pretty quickly buried, is nofollowed on a robots.txt-prohibited page that not even many humans visit, and has no chance of being posted by the manual story-posting process.
  • pg 16y ago
    Actually most individual spammers learn fairly quickly that spamming HN doesn't work. At any given time the spammers are mostly new arrivals.
    • thinkbohemian 16y ago
      Robots.txt User-Agent: * Disallow: /x? Disallow: /vote? Disallow: /reply? Disallow: /submitted? Disallow: /submitlink? Disallow: /threads?
      • sorbus 16y ago
        One assumes that a core characteristic of spammers and spambots is that they ignore Robots.txt - or at least I would be extremely surprised if disallowing them in robots.txt has any effect.
    • seejay 16y ago
      I also think HN regulars are not the kind of the people that spammers could use... still it'd be pretty annoying during the period they learn that (the hard way)
    • ivankirigin 16y ago
      Do you define new arrivals as new accounts. It seems like a moderately competent spammer would look like a new spammer every time