roytang.net Posts Photos Archives About

IDK why, but for the past few weeks I've gotten more and more spammy mentions coming in via webmention.io. (Possibly a sign of my blog becoming more popular? Lol)

They're super easy to spot because they're always mentions from URLs that mention things I never write about here like adult personnals, hookups or online poker.

So quick change to how the site processes incoming webmentions: I used to just auto-approve any new ones coming in via webmention.io, but now they will only get auto-approved if I have previously approved a comment from the same domain.

I must admit being quite mystified to all this effort to create backlinks to one's spammy and probably machine-generated "content". Just another reminder of how badly trying to game search engine algorithms has affected the web.

Sat, April 1, 2023, 4:40 p.m. / / blog / #blogging / Syndicated: mastodon twitter / 💬 1 / 131 words

Last modified at: April 1, 2023, 4:45 p.m. Source file

Referenced by

Comments

Same thing here. I also reverted to block-by-default unless it’s in the allowed list. Perhaps it would be a good idea to share our domain block list somehow just like the Pi-Hole rules? Things like https://github.com/justdomains/blocklists exist that I could integrate with my Webmention server but I can’t find any domain in those lists that I blocked (also no matches on https://www.spam.org/) so not sure if it’s worth the effort…

via brainbaking.com