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Comment by dschobel | Hacker News Reader

Yikes, 2 out of every 3 submissions (as of right now, at least) are [dead].

This may be a problem which requires a procedural solution rather than the goodwill volunteerism of HNers.

Don't worry, that's normal. Low, in fact, because this is a weekend.

There are already such solutions, and those are what killed most of these submissions. But I'm happy to have humans helping out too.

Jesus.

Can't you make hn links non-follow? At least of the newbies?

Links under a certain karma threshold are marked nofollow. I think the criteria is 4 or 5 karma.

Doesn't seem to deter a large proportion of spammers, either--- I guess spamming is cheap enough that you might as well shotgun it, instead of bothering to research each site's nofollow policies. If you ever look at Slashdot's submission queue, there's a ton of spam in there too, despite the fact that it gets pretty quickly buried, is nofollowed on a robots.txt-prohibited page that not even many humans visit, and has no chance of being posted by the manual story-posting process.

Actually most individual spammers learn fairly quickly that spamming HN doesn't work. At any given time the spammers are mostly new arrivals.

Do you define new arrivals as new accounts. It seems like a moderately competent spammer would look like a new spammer every time

I also think HN regulars are not the kind of the people that spammers could use... still it'd be pretty annoying during the period they learn that (the hard way)

Robots.txt

User-Agent: * Disallow: /x? Disallow: /vote? Disallow: /reply? Disallow: /submitted? Disallow: /submitlink? Disallow: /threads?

One assumes that a core characteristic of spammers and spambots is that they ignore Robots.txt - or at least I would be extremely surprised if disallowing them in robots.txt has any effect.

> This may be a problem which requires a procedural solution rather than the goodwill volunteerism of HNers.

I noticed most of the accounts whose submissions were killed were created just a day ago. Perhaps it would be best to disable submission of stories by accounts that don't have a certain number of karma points and/or haven't existed for a certain number of days?

There would then be the issue of HNers who wanted to submit stories/comment anonymously occasionally, but that might be best solved by having a "submit anonymously" option.

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