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.
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)
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.
Why not restrict submissions to users with over, say, 10 karma? Only a tiny subset of spammers would write comments to get over that hurdle (though it would only take a couple of reasonable ones). Has this been discussed extensively before?
Yeah, I've thought the same thing as it seems like it would be helpful (but still possible compared to something like the dribbble invite system).
Also, another idea I had would be to make link submissions cost karma. It could even be dynamic based on your average story up-votes (i.e if you submit stories that get up-votes it costs you 1 karma, otherwise more).
In the end, this is PG's site and I'm sure he has thought of (and tried) a lot of things.
I wonder if a post anonymous button would work or would it just lead to an overuse of anonymous posting. Something reasonable would be to restrict it to 1 anonymous topic a week and only anonymous replies in that single topic.
Noobstories contains links posted from newly-created user accounts. The category is intended for moderation and tends to have more spam than others - the OP is asking you to flag spam articles on Noobstories to maintain the overall high-quality of HN.
I'm sure the scenarios and solutions have been thought through, but this is an issue that frustrates me, especially in the mornings, when activity is lighter, and there's a higher noise-to-signal ratio. (Or maybe that's just when I notice it more.) I flag what I can, and I'm sure the automated filters do catch most (per PG's comment), but there seems to be a really easy way to combat most of this:
1. accounts need to be active for X days before they can comment (at all)
2. accounts need to have a karma score over Y to submit posts
#1: No, increasing the latency of the time it takes to post spam has nothing to do with the throughput.
#2: Probably not a good idea. It's very hard to get lots of karma from comments alone, and you start to cut in on actually useful posts, like a new founder posting a link to his/her company at launch.
Re #2, it'd only take even needing 4 or 5 karma to dissuade the majority of spammers. And hard? The majority of my > 10k karma comes from comments - possibly even over 90%.
It's not far fetched to expect people to have posted one or two comments a couple of people vote up before being able to submit and it'd decimate this problem.
It would help to have the "noobstories" header on the main HN page. Only after typing in the URL http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories is that header visible.
This may be a problem which requires a procedural solution rather than the goodwill volunteerism of HNers.