Self-recommendations now omitted

The system now auto-omits self-recommendations, when an LT author recommends their own book.

There are a lot of ways of policing this. As the number is low (around 40?), I decided to just omit them silently. The member who added them sees them, though. (So spam away, but nobody will see it.)

Note, an author can recommend FROM their books. If they mistake the recommendation reciprocal, the one to their book will not be visible to others.

See https://www.librarything.com/topic/294627 for discussion of what to do with "suspected" authors.

Lovely! Devious!

Thanks for your attention to these issues.

>2 2wonderY:

This is my favorite spam-fighting technique. The more you fight spammers, the cleverer they get, and the more they spam.

>3 timspalding: And NICE to see that you have time to code and comment!

Wow, thanks! I definitely appreciate all the feature requests you've been tackling this week.

Even if the number is low, this was one of the more annoying things I'd encounter with over-zealous authors. I'm glad now that I just don't have to worry about it.

It's an elegant design, and the stealth approach (somewhat undermined by this thread, I suppose, but I'm not griping about that) makes sense. I do presume many spammers would check their work from another account to verify their efforts work as intended, nevertheless the overall approach makes sense and aligns with the approach to LT Authors reviewing their own books.

It looks like self-recommendations are not being hidden from the "Recent member recommendations" module on the homepage. Screenshot:



That recommendation does not show on the work page, where it is correctly being suppressed:

https://www.librarything.com/work/816613

>8 lorax: Good catch. I'll ping Tim.

Fixed. Thanks.

https://www.librarything.com/work/12227154

This recommendation is probably from a sock puppet profile.

>11 2wonderY: The amount of obvious sock puppetry on that author is amazing!