News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: 2 karma minimum to lock out spam bots.

Re:Ask HN: 2 karma minimum to lock out spam bots by DarkShikari on Friday April 24, 2009 @06:29AM (#577267)
I saw an interesting method used by spambots on the Doom9 forum: they would take old threads and repost them (with a link to their ad in their signature or such).

Some variant of this method might work to circumvent such a policy; find a similar thread, pick a comment from it, and post it, perhaps? It might only work 20% of the time, but that's good enough to get some spam accounts with URLs approved.

Of course this would all take effort, and might be enough to lock out a lot of would-be spammers, or at least convince them to go somewhere else.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: 2 karma minimum to lock out spam bots by Tichy on Friday April 24, 2009 @06:47AM (#577284)
Reminds me of what I see on my Wordpress Blog: lot's of 0-content comments like "this is a cool article". At first they didn't make sense (blocked them anyway), but then I remembered the Wordpress settings for comments. By default, it is set to "commentors must have been approved at least once". So I guess if I would let one of those innocent comments through, they would be back with more serious stuff.

Spammers are crafty...

[ Parent | on HN ]