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I disagree with TFA's take on dealing with spam — giving up! For our app, we don't deal with spam in any novel way. We use honey pot, SFS, and Akismet. Howeve
by julianlam 4y ago
I disagree with TFA's take on dealing with spam — giving up!
For our app, we don't deal with spam in any novel way. We use honey pot, SFS, and Akismet.
However, by far the easiest way to stop spammers is a post queue. Lots of spammers will just create a burner account, fire off their spam, and start over. Given no actual reputation, give them the trust they deserve — none.
The other factor is building out a fast backend. Besides benefiting your own users, it also means Googlebot or Ahrefsbot won't absolutely cripple your site when they come knocking. Sometimes that is doable, sometimes not.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago(Author) I'm running a search engine though. Do you propose I require users to register an account, and then not allow them to search? I think my backend is plenty fast given it's hosted on a PC off domestic broadband. Most searches complete sub-100ms.
- julianlam 4y agoHey, thanks for the reply! Specific scenarios require creative solutions. For a search engine, how do you differentiate between robots and legitimate users? It seems a rate limiting step is likely the best solution. If query rate from the same IP exceeds a threshold, throttle them creatively. +100ms the next time, +250ms the next, etc. The upside is these bots will adjust their strategies to hit your site slower, which is the whole point, isn't it. If they spread requests across IPs, perhaps try fingerprinting. I'm not sure how effective that is on the backend though.