I’ve been engaged in an ongoing war with spammers. Because Bear is free-to-use it’s naturally the target of backlink farmers, credit card phishers, illegal drug sellers, online casino advertisers, and crypto shillers.
I won’t go into too much detail on the causes. I’ve written about them twice before. In brief: the barrier to entry is low (easy signup to a free service) which leads to bad actors trying to exploit the platform (usually for backlinks).
For context, this isn’t bot traffic. It’s instead the kinds of spam farms you can purchase 100 backlinks from on Fiverr. They have a team of a few hundred low paid workers submitting content to every corner of the web in the hopes it will boost SEO ranking (it won’t).
To combat this, I have a few mechanisms in place. If a piece of spam is posted on Bear, it is by default not visible to the wider internet until reviewed. All unreviewed blogs have “no-index” and “no-follow” tags and do not show up on the sitemap or discovery feed. This is easily resolved by opting into a review. However, I’d still prefer the spam content weren’t on the platform at all, regardless of its discoverability.
Enter Akismet. This is a spam detection tool by the WordPress people and is pretty ac
