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by gramakri 2054 days ago
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.
2 comments

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?