How we’re combating spam
We’ve implemented a bunch of features which we hope will make Sift’d unattractive to spammers. Our main goal with spam is to remove the incentives that attract spammers in the first place, which primarily is the benefits they get with search engines when they post their links on websites.
Upcoming and failed submissions have the rel=”nofollow” attribute appended to their source link so there is no SEO benefit to submitting stories unless they are made popular. By removing the “free backlink” incentive from stories that don’t deserve it we remove the reward dodgy search engine optimizers reap from sites that allow them to submit links.
Each story can have related links added to them that users are also able to vote on. Any related link with a negative score is replaced with a url shortening service that redirects to the original url, but which search engines won’t attach any weight to. Links in comments are also piped through a url shortening service to make comment spam less attractive.
Additionally, each user can create their own set of filters to block any users or websites they feel are spam.
SiftKarma is also a powerful tool to prevent spam. Each time people bury a spammer’s submissions and comments the spammer has less and less weight on the site, making it harder for their submissions to reach the comment place and not displaying their comments once they reach a certain negative threshold.
None of these features actually prevent spam or hinder site usage in any way, but they do give us a foundation to work from that we can develop further as needed to combat spam. One idea we’re toying with is to create a system that detects frequently blocked users and websites and blocks them from using the site until they can be human-reviewed, after which they can be reinstated or permanently blocked.
We welcome all discussion and ideas on how spam can be beaten without compromising usability and honest users’ experience.
