
Ask HN: How do you deal with spam profiles? - karjaluoto
Over the past months, our service has been hit pretty hard by spammers who create corporate profiles (which we do not allow) and then pack them with search terms. More recently, they’ve started posting topic and comment spam along the same lines (think: “best family lawyer in Rochester, NY”).<p>I’ve tried a number of ways of dealing with these folks, but with no success. As such, I’m forced to watch site activity carefully, and then delete accounts&#x2F;content as quickly as I can. (This is the first thing I do every morning. I repeat the process numerous times a day—and even peek in once more, before going to bed.)<p>Today, though, I reached out to the SEO company’s client directly, noting that their SEO provider is using black-hat methods. To my surprise, the person at the company got back to me, apologized, and cc’d me on the email they sent, questioning their SEO provider on what was going on.<p>As such, I’m considering doing this (alerting the company mentioned in the spam) with every spam account created on our service—and seeing if it stems the activity. Just curious if any of you have experienced the same, or have any suggestions on potential ways of discouraging this sort of activity.
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eberkund
When the service your site is being spammed with is something reputable then I
think the approach you are taking works very well. The trouble is when it is
more sketchy services that your site is getting spammed with that you can't
take the same course of action. Other than that though, have you tried
integrating a captcha or something? Or are you fairly certain it is a human
doing the posting?

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karjaluoto
These are all manual postings. Seems that a bunch of “SEO” companies in the
U.S. are outsourcing this work to Bangladesh.

