[OSM-dev] Spam in Users' Diaries and Users' Pages

Robert (Jamie) Munro rjmunro at arjam.net
Tue Mar 16 23:45:52 GMT 2010


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Tom Hughes wrote:
> On 15/03/10 13:21, Eugene Alvin Villar wrote:
> 
>> I think one really effective way of dealing with this is to reject
>> addition of a user description or a diary entry if the user is quite new
>> and has no OSM edits yet. This would correspond to the Wikipedia user
>> without the autoconfirmed bit set yet.
> 
> The first thing a new user is (hopefully) going to do is add a 
> description - we actually deposit them on the settings page when they 
> confirm their account precisely to encourage that.

But we need not make that description or their diary entries visible to
other users until they have gained some reputation on the site -
presumably by making map edits. Once they become a trusted member, their
description and all of their diary appears as normal.

There are 2 approaches to this:

* Document clearly that their info is hidden until they reach a certain
level of well-known-ness, because of spam problems.
* Make it look to them like their spamming is working, at least until
they log out. If you want to be sneaky about it, you could make them
show up to their own IP address. The idea being that if they think it is
working, they will not try to work around the safeguards, e.g. by making
trivial edits or even random bad edits to get enough reputation.

Robert (Jamie) Munro
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