Explanation
Design and implement a comprehensive abuse prevention framework for spoo.me to reduce phishing, scam, and spam links while preserving the platform's privacy-first philosophy and keeping false positives as low as possible.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
As spoo.me has grown, it has increasingly become a target for abuse by scammers and phishing campaigns. Recently, this has resulted in reputation issues, including warnings from external security providers, which negatively affect legitimate users and the platform as a whole.
While individual malicious links can be blocked manually, this approach does not scale. We need a long-term system that can proactively detect, prevent, and respond to abuse while minimizing the impact on legitimate users.
Describe the solution you'd like
Create a modular abuse prevention framework that can evolve over time. Some ideas include (but are not limited to):
- Risk scoring for newly created links.
- Domain and destination reputation checks.
- Detection of suspicious URL creation patterns.
- Click velocity and traffic anomaly detection.
- Detection of mass-created links from the same actor.
- Automated quarantine or review for high-risk links.
- Community reporting tools.
- Better internal moderation tooling.
- Configurable blocklists and allowlists.
- AI-assisted abuse classification where appropriate.
- Human review for uncertain cases.
- Telemetry and analytics to continuously improve detection accuracy.
The framework should be modular so that individual detection strategies can be added, removed, or improved independently without requiring major architectural changes.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Current mitigation largely relies on manual reports and individual link removals. While effective for isolated cases, this does not scale as the platform grows and new abuse patterns emerge.
A strict allowlist or aggressive blocking strategy was also considered, but it would introduce unnecessary friction for legitimate users and conflict with spoo.me's goal of remaining simple and accessible.
Instead, a layered detection system combining multiple independent signals would provide a more scalable and balanced solution.
Additional context
This issue is intended to serve as the primary design and discussion thread for abuse prevention within spoo.me.
The exact implementation is intentionally left open. Contributors are encouraged to propose ideas, research existing approaches used by other URL shorteners, and discuss potential architectures before implementation begins.
The goal is to build a system that significantly reduces abuse while maintaining a smooth experience for legitimate users.
Explanation
Design and implement a comprehensive abuse prevention framework for spoo.me to reduce phishing, scam, and spam links while preserving the platform's privacy-first philosophy and keeping false positives as low as possible.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
As spoo.me has grown, it has increasingly become a target for abuse by scammers and phishing campaigns. Recently, this has resulted in reputation issues, including warnings from external security providers, which negatively affect legitimate users and the platform as a whole.
While individual malicious links can be blocked manually, this approach does not scale. We need a long-term system that can proactively detect, prevent, and respond to abuse while minimizing the impact on legitimate users.
Describe the solution you'd like
Create a modular abuse prevention framework that can evolve over time. Some ideas include (but are not limited to):
The framework should be modular so that individual detection strategies can be added, removed, or improved independently without requiring major architectural changes.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Current mitigation largely relies on manual reports and individual link removals. While effective for isolated cases, this does not scale as the platform grows and new abuse patterns emerge.
A strict allowlist or aggressive blocking strategy was also considered, but it would introduce unnecessary friction for legitimate users and conflict with spoo.me's goal of remaining simple and accessible.
Instead, a layered detection system combining multiple independent signals would provide a more scalable and balanced solution.
Additional context
This issue is intended to serve as the primary design and discussion thread for abuse prevention within spoo.me.
The exact implementation is intentionally left open. Contributors are encouraged to propose ideas, research existing approaches used by other URL shorteners, and discuss potential architectures before implementation begins.
The goal is to build a system that significantly reduces abuse while maintaining a smooth experience for legitimate users.