phab.mercurial-scm.org is completely overrun with SEO spam

[Raphaël Gomès]

On 2/7/22 15:07, vlofgren wrote:
> Hello
>
> I apologize in advance if this isn't the right place to send this, I've turned
> the mercurial-scm.org-website upside down looking for a webmaster URL or some
> sort of contact information but come up with nothing. My hope is that someone
> on this list knows who this should be sent to, and will help me get it to that
> person.
Thank you for reaching out. This is indeed a good place to find someone 
who is in a position to do something.
> To make a long story short, I run a homebrew search engine, and in cleaning
> out some spam links from my own index, I've discovered that your phabricator
> instance is being used for search engine spam. By linking from your a high
> value domain like mercurial-scm.org, they're able to boost their own search
> engine ranking.
I would have assumed that Phabricator put nofollow attributes on 
external links, but it appears not. Phabricator has abysmal spam 
handling features, simply trying to remove a user warns that "you might 
break everything". I'll try to look into a short-term solution when I 
get time, but this is relatively low priority given the upcoming freeze 
and major release.
> I stumbled upon this project:
> https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/project/profile/684/
>
> But there appears to be hundreds upon hundreds of them:
>
> https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/project/
>
> Thanks,
> / V
Thanks again, Raphaël
>
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