[OSM-talk] Spam on Diaries

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Tom Hughes wrote:
> Do you have some suggestions? It's hard to see what we can do about this 
> sort of (presumably manual) spamming where people are prepared to go to 
> the trouble of registering and confirming an account beyond deleting the 
> accounts.

What I would suggest: Leave user pages alone; if someone wants to they 
can write any spam messages into their diaries, and if someone else is 
compelled to read exactly this user's diary then so be it.

However, where you aggregate user diaries into the global diary/feed, 
only aggregate those that have the "clean" flag set.

"clean" flag to be newly introduced on diary entry table and checked 
whenever an entry is saved. Initial rule: Set to true unless diary entry 
has > 10 URLs or > 2k (or something like that). Could also borrow 
"karma" logic from Trac antispam (give e.g. bonus points to users that 
have been registered for > 6 months or so) but that can be saved for later.

Don't alert the user to anything - just quietly ignore fishy posts for 
the global feed (as I believe that is what spammers are after).

This has the advantage that having a few false positives will not hurt - 
  even an entry not marked "clean" will sit on the user's diary and be 
seen by those who open his page, maybe coming from a later diary post or so.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"