mahara-contributors team mailing list archive

[Aaron Wells <1252101@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Since deploying this to Mahara.org on Nov 18, we've seen only one spam
forum post (which as Kristina mentioned, didn't include any links).

And since deploying the expansion on Nov 21, I've seen only one spam
Page. It was shared with Logged-In users, but not with Public, because
the user was still probationary. I suspect that it's a spammer who
created the page and then realized only afterwards that they couldn't
make it visible to the outside world.

At some point we should set someone looking through all the user
accounts to delete the spam ones, though. I went and looked through all
the wall posts created in November 2013 and found that there were 42
accounts created during that month whose sole content consisted of a
spam wall post on their own profile page's wall. This was all before Nov
21 when I blocked external links in wall posts, so that's about 2
accounts per day.

Overall in November 2013 there were 970 user accounts created, of which
we suspended 94 for being spammers (nearly all of them before Nov 21).

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1252101

Title:
  Wishlist: Prevent new users from taking spammy actions

Status in Mahara ePortfolio:
  In Progress

Bug description:
  As mentioned in https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1250641 , to
  combat spam on mahara.org, this is a feature request to add a new user
  probationary period, during which the user can't take actions that are
  potentially spammy.

  In the prototype implementation it's limited to the forums:

  1. New (self-registered) users start with a number of probationary points.
  2. When they take actions other non-probationary users approve of, their probationary points are reduced. When they hit 0, the user is no longer probationary.
  3. A probationary user can't post links or images in forum posts
  4. If a non-probationary user posts a direct reply to one of their forum posts or topics, their probationary points are reduced by 1.
  5. The number of probation points they start with is configured in config.php

  Additional features it would be good to add:

  1. Make the probation points configurable via the admin UI
  2. Make the actions that are prohibited, configurable via the admin UI?
  3. Additional actions to prevent -- links in direct messages & feedback, creation of public-accessible pages
  4. Admins can clear (or increase) a user's probation points via the account settings
  5. Report page to show probationary users.
  6. Notifications to admins when a probationary user attempts a forbidden action, with quick-link to suspend the user
  7. Report page to show which non-probationary users approved of the probationary user (so you can check for spammer-approvers)
  8. "Report objectionably content" link for forum posts
  9. Display of user's overall post count on forum posts
  10. Potentially some way of limiting all this to only certain forums (although I can't think of a good conceptual model for that)

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