Say hello to Sketchy the spam fighter

Sketchy is a spam-fighting, open-source software framework developed by SoundCloud engineers Matt Weiden, Rany Keddo, and Michael Brückner. Sketchy reduces malicious user activity on web applications. You can use it to address several common issues:

• Detect when a user submits text that contains spam content.
• Detect when a user submits multiple texts that are nearly identical.
• Rate-limit malicious actions that users perform repeatedly.
• Check user signatures such as IP addresses against external blacklist APIs.
• Collect and consolidate reports of spam from users.

We created Sketchy so that we could fight spam around the clock. Any startup that reaches the scale of SoundCloud has to deal with spammers on a daily basis. We decided to release Sketchy as open-source software so other companies don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Since we’ve released it, Sketchy has been featured on GigaOM.

Sketchy has been deprecated and is no longer in use. It worked well for many years but has since been replaced by other services.