mahara-contributors team mailing list archive

[Aaron Wells <1250641@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As mentioned in https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/732522 , we're
actually not even applying Mahara's current spam filters to the forum!
So I think that's the first thing to try.

Some other strategies we discussed on IRC:

1. Moderation queue: Mahara currently has no moderation queue feature.
For mahara.org we wouldn't want this because it would slow down
discussion too much (i.e. person in UK makes a post, admins in NZ
approve it the next day)

2. Bayesian spam detection: Could be useful, but non-trivial to add.
There are plenty of existing libraries for this, though. And Son has
even implemented his own as part of his PhD thesis.

3. Requiring human approval of user account registration: This feature
is already implemented, so we'd just have to switch it on. On the other
hand, it could be tricky to pick out the spammers from people who just
aren't good at using English (and mahara.org has several non-English
forums!). Also, it would frustrate legitimate new users trying to ask a
question about their installation problems or fix something on the wiki.

4. Filtered moderation queue: If a message looks spammy, it goes in the
moderation queue. Avoids the slowing of discussion, but it requires
implementing numbers #1 and #3 above

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1250641

Title:
  mahara.org forum spam

Status in Mahara ePortfolio:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Mahara gets a steady annoying flow of forum spam. On a typical day
  it's 5 to 10 messages. This isn't a whole lot, but since the number of
  messages on mahara.org's forums is fairly low, this makes up about 40%
  of the messages each day.

  I'm opening this bug to explore options to deal with this issue.

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