If you allow new users to create user profiles with links, and those user profiles are visible to Google, spammers will create a bunch of new user accounts and fill them with spam links.
The easiest way to prevent this is to block Google from seeing user profiles by requiring login to see the profiles.
Because spammers fill the publicly viewable things-- like snippets and user profiles-- with spam. If it can be viewed without logging in, then they get it indexed with Google and it dilutes the search results.
Nobody views snippets and user profiles as a common part of daily development, so it takes time away from development to investigate those things to prune them. And if you don't prune it fast enough, it gets into the search results at which point it's even more of a pain in the ass to remove (even using Google's webmaster tools).
> Because spammers fill the publicly viewable things-- like snippets and user profiles-- with spam. If it can be viewed without logging in, then they get it indexed with Google and it dilutes the search results.
Isn't then the problem not that it is viewable but that it's not excluded from indexing by robots.txt?
Anything visible without login will be visible to people who want to follow a bare URL to your tracker and visible to a search engine crawler, making it visible to people without a URL who just search for the issue. That is, indeed, a plus.
But even if you require login to post stuff to the issue tracker, creating a login and posting a comment has been trivially automated.
You're no longer running a useful issue tracker, you're running a free ad network: you're hosting a dozen useful issues and a thousand advertisements and blackhat SEO comments for spammers.
If it's not visible to search engines, and your repo doesn't get much traffic, it's not nearly as valuable to spammers. It's kind of like cutting off your nose to spite your face, but those basic economics of cost to spammers, cost to users, value to spammers, and value to users are the only rules that you can really apply when hosting content on the Internet.
I think the idea is that if you can't view issues without logging in, then google won't index your issues (because it can't view them), so you won't get people spamming in order to get into google
