On 10/11/13 03:57, Nathan Larson wrote:
Also, we have other antispam tools that are way more effective than nofollow at deterring spam.
Like what? AbuseFilter is unusable for small wikis, SpamBlacklist is poorly maintained, and FancyCaptcha is comprehensively broken -- we have had reports of sites with FancyCaptcha being spammed to death. Pretty much any captcha can be broken for $1.39 per 1000. You wouldn't need very many impressions per edit for that to be economical.
Also, well-designed search engines should have other measures too for sorting out what's spammy.
Sure, they do have such measures, but after years of incremental development, the measures were clearly not working, which is why Google introduced nofollow.
-- Tim Starling