Propose new functionalities for Decidim software
#DecidimRoadmap Designing Decidim together
Dereference (new) profile pages to limit spam exposure and disincentivise spam accounts
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Many platforms are suffering from spam bots creating accounts with profiles promoting services in their profile picture, description and personal URL.
The suspect reason behind them creating accounts is to be able to spread links and keywords in the wider web by increasing their exposition.
As you can see in the attached picture, spam profiles are easy to find on search engines such as Google (in the example, a simple search for "decidim escort" finds 4 spam profiles for escorts)
Describe the solution you'd like
Following the improvement made by @ahu to prevent spammers from gaining traffic and SEO juice from their actions, I found this page from Google describing some tips to reduce comment spam on websites.
One of the suggestions is to dereference the profile pages from Google and other search engines to reduce even further the reward.
To achieve that, one way is to add in the <head> of the profile pages:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Describe alternatives you've considered
The documentation from Google adds that this can be done in a more targeted way, for example by disabling referencing only for new users. The tag could be added when generating the page for users who created their profile less than a month ago, or users with less than 3 proposals published...
In the same vein, the dereferencing could also be applied to new proposals?
Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.
Could this issue have an impact on users private data?
No
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Funded by Digidem Lab.
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3 comments
What do you think @ahu? Even in a targeted way, this should be really easy to implement.
I am curious to hear what people would find about the downside of dereferencing public profiles from the web. On our platforms, I can say with certainty that this wouldn't have any negative consequences (and it's not reducing transparency since the profiles are still available through the platform). It would also mostly solve a concern raised by @ahu two years ago about people's profile being public and exposed on search engines (Ability to disable public profiles).
Conversation with Antti Hukkanen
I support this but it does not solve the public profile privacy issue. It is an improvement towards that, which is why I support it.
I agree and again the main goal would be to solve the spam bot issue.
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