Are the people who write spambots writing them with the intention of spamming here, or the intention of spamming reddits in general?Here seems like wasted effort.
I suspect the spam is targeted more at search engine bots than forum members, the goal being to boost the ranking of the spammer’s website in search results.
If that’s the case, then when a page is hidden the metadata should be updated to remove it from the search indexes. If you search ’pandora site:lesswrong.com′ on Google, all the pages are still there, and can be followed back to LW. That is to say, the spammers are still benefiting from every piece of spam they’ve ever posted here.
Emphasising parent. If spammers don’t get any benefit from including this site in their bots then they are less likely to take the effort to include it—and the effort of handling catphcas and configuring to local conditions.
I just did the search and noticed that both HP:MoR and RationalWiki://lesswrong make it onto the first page. Neither of them include the word ‘pandora’. That’s impressive!
Are the people who write spambots writing them with the intention of spamming here, or the intention of spamming reddits in general? Here seems like wasted effort.
I suspect the spam is targeted more at search engine bots than forum members, the goal being to boost the ranking of the spammer’s website in search results.
If that’s the case, then when a page is hidden the metadata should be updated to remove it from the search indexes. If you search ’pandora site:lesswrong.com′ on Google, all the pages are still there, and can be followed back to LW. That is to say, the spammers are still benefiting from every piece of spam they’ve ever posted here.
Emphasising parent. If spammers don’t get any benefit from including this site in their bots then they are less likely to take the effort to include it—and the effort of handling catphcas and configuring to local conditions.
I just did the search and noticed that both HP:MoR and RationalWiki://lesswrong make it onto the first page. Neither of them include the word ‘pandora’. That’s impressive!
I’d expect forums in general, with a module here and there for “Reddits” and specific instance thereof.