rant.li being used for spam

[fnitp]

Hi, I was browsing the reader and noticed that most of the posts are spam/advertisements. Is there moderation on rant.li?

[zer-far]

Hello, I try to moderate the site regularly. The number of new posts every day makes it hard to keep up. In the past, I tried some rules to remove spam accounts but there were false positives.

New accounts don’t show up in the reader automatically and WriteFreely adds the nofollow attribute by default to all external links.

I’m going to look into this again soon. Thanks for using rant.li.

[fnitp]

Hi! It should be me that's thanking you for hosting rant.li. It's great that there's already moderation :)

I don't think spammers realise that external links are nofollow...

If you'd like, I can do some moderation work on the instance and compile a list of blogs that I think are spam.

And also I have an idea for spam prevention, hope it's not overstepping to write it out.

I think most important is moderating new accounts - if new spammers are blocked, then it is possible to moderate the 230k blogs in a finite amount of time. WriteFreely doesn't have an inbuilt "what's your reason for signing up?" box yet. Maybe new users can be asked to title their first post something like "VERIFICATION" and then include a short paragraph describing what their blog will be about. New accounts will be force-unlisted until they are manually verified. If an account is more than ten days old and unable to be verified, it may be freely deleted.

[zer-far]

If you'd like, I can do some moderation work on the instance and compile a list of blogs that I think are spam.

Your verification idea could work and I'd be happy to discuss further. Please email me at abdullah@rant.li.