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[Bug 1250641] Re: [ongoing] mahara.org forum spam

 

I was giving this a little thought, and I think there are a few
different milestones we can aim for here:

Milestone 1: Preventing a spammer from flooding email with dozens of
posts in a single hour.

Milestone 2: Preventing a spammer from flooding email with dozens of
posts over the course of a weekend.

Milestone 3: Total elimination of spam emails.

Different techniques would be needed for each of these. Milestone 3, in
particular, would require total human moderation of posts by
probationary users, and may not be feasible for us.


On a related note, it occurs to me that post rate throttling can't be a full solution to any of these, even Milestone 1. Even if we limited probationary users to, say, 3 posts per day, a spammer could simply register multiple accounts in order to circumvent that. We could try to throttle user registrations per IP or computer, but that's easily circumvented using proxies.

On the other hand, a global post rate throttle could be useful. Like, if
there are more than 3 posts by *any* probationary user in a 24 hour
period, we start sending all probationary user posts to moderation.

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

Title:
  [ongoing] 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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References