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Comment by russell | Hacker News Reader

How about banning links in comments until a small karma level, say 10, or a few days registration? Another possibility might be deletion privileges for questionable comments for hackers above a certain karma or registration time. By questionable, I mean comments of a certain form from new users, rather than being completely subjective.

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Allowing users to:

    only comment without links up to 10 karma, 
    submit at 20 karma, 
    comment with links at 50 karma, etc.

sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.

Initially one proves themselves in discussion, then they can bring new ideas to the table. By setting the limits at relatively low levels it doesn't discourage new participants.

As a relatively new member of the community, I believe that this is important because you don't want the community to become static any more than you want to get overrun a la digg, reddit, etc.

A few days registration won't work, though, because the bad guys will just start setting up accounts, keeping them dormant for the waiting period, and then do their dastardly deeds. Besides, karma is a better measure than seniority.

EDIT: You should realize something, that spammers might create 10 accounts. 1 account that makes a comment, and the other 9 accounts would vote up for the other account's comments, to increase the karma and pass the karma threshold.

This is similar to what I wrote here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506028 Users should have a history record.

But it won't be an effecient solution, according to briansmith's approach.

Spammers could hire users to comment. Here is how I imagine it: 1- Spammers crawl the submitted article.

2- Ask real users to read it and comment on it.

3- Copy what users said and submit it automatically here.

4- You will think it's NOT a spam, and you will up-vote what the spammer commented, and this will allow the spammer to submit content and the problem won't be really solved/ but reduced.

If one adopts the concept of many different karma thresholds, then it becomes trivial to say that only users with X karma can upvote. Set it to some modest level, and when they hit X karma, new legitimate users will feel rewarded for their contributions!

I agree that there will always be gaming strategies. I just think that having gradually increasing rights/priveleges at quick incremental karma steps is a good way to combat spammers.

Your suggestions seem reasonable... if it gets to the point of an all-out War On Spam-bots. Unless things get that bad, it may be sufficient simply to make it a little more difficult for the spammers (so that they go hit on other sites). Meanwhile, I doubt that many spammers are going to go to trouble to create the mutually-supportive accounts (and certainly not actually spending money by hiring live users).

About hiring live users... it will be a slave hiring, without paying money.

Here is how it works, just one of these 2 options:

1- Spammers automatically create a blog, crawl the submitted articles here to their blog, and wait for a real user to comment on it, and then submit that comment here.

Or: 2- Spammers would create a bot that crawls the submitted article, submit that article to any public social news website, and wait for real users' comments, and then automatically submit the real users' comments here, and you will think it is NOT a bot/spam, but it is.

EDIT: This is something that can be implemented these days, not after a decade!

If this happens, will you think that this is a bot or not?

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