Your point underestimates the value of having incoming links from a lot of different high ranked sites. It also, I assume, overestimates the difficulty of adapting a spambot and underestimates the likelyhood that the outcome would be check.
Spamming a site does actually require ongoing effort. A steady stream of account creation, captcha passing, email account creation and IP address sourcing. A click to check that it works does not seem unlikely. Mind you that click would probably go along with the click to test incoming links from all sources—and lesswrong would still be going along just fine there.
Hmmm. You might be right. Are links from Less Wrong actually that valuable that they would spend time designing ways to spam our site in particular? It seems like there would be more low-hanging fruit for them to target.
Hard to say without knowing more about them (than I’d care to bother with. :P) Lesswrong links would be more valuable than the majority of the forums out there that are readily spammable but I am not sure how broad there spambot net is.
By way of ballpark estimate I too would be surprised if they bothered to create mutual upvote scenarios. (I’d expect them to just switch to comment spam if anything.)
We are not the audience. The audience is Google PageRank.
Yes I realized that after I posted- the point remains.
Your point underestimates the value of having incoming links from a lot of different high ranked sites. It also, I assume, overestimates the difficulty of adapting a spambot and underestimates the likelyhood that the outcome would be check.
Spamming a site does actually require ongoing effort. A steady stream of account creation, captcha passing, email account creation and IP address sourcing. A click to check that it works does not seem unlikely. Mind you that click would probably go along with the click to test incoming links from all sources—and lesswrong would still be going along just fine there.
Hmmm. You might be right. Are links from Less Wrong actually that valuable that they would spend time designing ways to spam our site in particular? It seems like there would be more low-hanging fruit for them to target.
Hard to say without knowing more about them (than I’d care to bother with. :P) Lesswrong links would be more valuable than the majority of the forums out there that are readily spammable but I am not sure how broad there spambot net is.
By way of ballpark estimate I too would be surprised if they bothered to create mutual upvote scenarios. (I’d expect them to just switch to comment spam if anything.)