@codinghorror I’ve been in the trenches on this for a while so I have a strong opinion. (In my case, we haven’t had new spam for a long time now, but I still have the scars from the previous battles. :-))
While not meaningless, isn’t a deterrent to many spam operations. They may not guarantee any listings increase. Some just cite authorities as to why incoming links are “good” and then provide proof (a list or URLs) to you, the client, that you’ve got now got a bunch of incoming links from reputable sites. Remember, we’re talking about shady operations here and there is a wide range in the “quality” of the spamming operation. That they may not deliver benefit to their client probably doesn’t eat at their conscience.
This is useful. More so than the previous because the proof-of-work looks shoddier on pages without a real hyperlink.
The page exists, so the proof-of-work can still be provided. Also, as mentioned earlier, some (not many admittedly) of the spammers will have the human spammer do a low-quality reply or two somewhere in the forum (“I agree” / “Are you going to do follow up on this?” / “I never thought of that”) to ensure there is a discoverable link to the profile (which yes, is robots.txt excluded by default in Discourse’s case). If the system allows signatures (no with Discourse), they might also later add signature spam when the thread has fewer eyes on it.
So the “no hyperlinks think” is great, IMO. If it didn’t exist, I’d post the following without reservation. It does exist so it makes what I’m about to say less strong, but I get the sense that no real hyperlink existing may not always be a deterrent, otherwise they wouldn’t even spam the page with the URL, and boom, problem solved. Anyway, on to the opinion:
I am unconvinced by your argument that allowing people to reveal themselves as spammers outweighs the reality that you’ve now got spammy accounts hanging around. The reason I’m unconvinced is that the same spam house doesn’t typically just create one account on a forum never to return. They come back and create more for new clients. Even with the above mitigating factors you mention, Jeff, they’re still able to provide a link to their profile page as proof of work to their clients. If you stop that, they can’t provide that, and you’ve got 1 blank spam account instead of eventually hundreds. Remember, lots of these are human registrations these days–that’s why they’re coming from countries with cheap labor–and humans will know that they can’t fill out a profile and so shouldn’t return. With TL0 not having a profile by default, Discourse sites become dead to them for profile spamming.
I’m sensitive to your argument that letting people fill out a profile right away lets them invest in a community and thus may result in future activity. However, I’m unable to find evidence that a slight delay (to get to TL1) would have a significant negative impact since users are still learning the system anyway and aren’t going to be using all features (including profiles often) right away anyway. Ghost might be able to provide data demonstrating harm, but right now it is just a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument; they’ve noted the correlation, but not demonstrated the causation. I’ve looked around for other evidence that might exist out there to demonstrate the importance of allowing an early profile, but haven’t found it…yet. If good evidence is out there, I withdraw all objections to your TL0 profile default.
As a side note–Google is getting very good at identifying profile spam links as being low quality links and penalizing sites that are linked to from them, at least as part of a larger pattern. If you didn’t robots.txt exclude those profiles or nofollow the links, Discourse operators would start receiving emails asking you to remove some of those profile links because of the penalty. I always get a chuckle when I see those. Here’s an example of one I received recently. I’m not redacting the company name involved here it because I think the company probably did hire a spammer to generate the links in this case. (It isn’t unheard of for someone to hire a spammer to spam with links to a competitor’s site to force a Google penalty for that site):
My name is Cathy and I'm contacting you on behalf of http://www.futondeco.com/. First we want to thank you for linking to our site, as referrals are the lifeblood of our business. But unfortunately Google has identified your site as a possible reason why our rankings have recently dropped.
I believe the following links may be the ones causing the harm: [link to an old profile page containing a spam link to futondeco.com]
If you could spend just a little bit of time removing the links, I would be extremely grateful. Google sure is getting goofier by the month if you ask me. This kind of stuff makes absolutely no sense to me.
Thank you very much for your time and I look forward to hearing back from you.
Cathy LaClear
(http://www.futondeco.com/)
If you want an eye opening experience, I suggest you go through the motions (but stop short) of hiring one of these low-quality-spam groups. Corresponding with them will give you a better sense of how they operate and think.