[gramakri]

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.

[fancyfish]

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

[coder543]

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

[csdreamer7]

Or a nofollow option (add rel=nofollow)

[dnsmichi]

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...

[dnsmichi]

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

[coder543]

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-...

[dnsmichi]

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?