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Comment by csdreamer7 | Hacker News Reader

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csdreamer7

Why are they posting random text in Gitlab?

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This is a typical spam profile. Usually they contain links, which search engines follow.

https://forum.cloudron.io/user/cardioaseg

The link contains rel=nofollow.

That doesn't matter, see other comments below on Google's changing treatment of this attribute.

Also you'll find spambots posting on any open form on the internet even if it doesn't do them any good, because much of it is automated, so even if you hide the results the spam will still come in.

I don’t know for sure, but I think our Markdown implementation adds nofollow.

I used to think that spammers would stop if their spamming didn't win them any results. But they don't care. They spread their spam as widely as possible without trying to prune out the places where it does them no good.

I am not entirely sure. See https://forum.cloudron.io/users, if you go to say page 10 or something you will see all sorts of nonsense. I am still trying to figure what the best way to fight this spam (because captcha is enabled and required to even create accounts). But these are real people and not bots. I know this because they even post new messages all the time.

Definitely the SEO backlinks- for example one profile I see is linking to an Indian escort service in the profile.

Maybe GitLab needs an option to disable external linking, and filter any comment that contains an external link automatically

Or a nofollow option (add rel=nofollow)

That's a great idea. We have discussed ways of getting a trust level, and enable this for specific groups. Discourse uses the same system for preventing spam. "Good" bots detect the rel=nofollow and do not come back.

See my proposal here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/14156#note_258...

Iterating on my original thought, here is a smaller feature request for self-hosted GitLab instances. This can help GitLab.com too: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/273618

I still think an even better path to success is to allow entirely disabling linking for non-admins.

Google no longer treats "nofollow" as strongly as it used to: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-...

Thanks for sharing, I have added it to the issue, maybe you want to join the discussion there :) https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/273618#note_43...

Just so that I can follow - URLs posted by non-admins should not render as HTML URLs at all? Wouldn't that be quite limiting for OSS project members for example?

My opinion on the topic isn't definitive by any means, but I think a lot of projects would do just fine without allowing arbitrary hyperlinks to be added by non-admins.

I think being able to link to related issues and link into the code is still important, for example.

It's certainly a trade off, but spammers want it to be rendered as a link.

getting that sweet sweet seo backlink juice

Isn’t that why we add rel=nofollow to low friction user submitted links on our platforms?

Google changed the interpretation of those a year ago. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-...

> Looking at all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns.

It appears as though they want to mark these links in order to prevent inorganic SEO, not help it.

I don't get it. They post all this spam in the hopes that people click on the links therein, thereby boosting the ranking of those sites? Does that actually work at all?

It doesn’t actually require anyone clicking on the links. Google sees inbound links and uses that as a factor when calculating the ranking of the linked page.

I thought that was how it worked like a decade or more ago, but not today.

Regardless of whether it works, people still pay for it. I have a Facebook ad right now that says "Get over 500,000 backlinks for $29.99". No doubt it's someone with a bot that spams comment forms.

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