[Web] What are we going to do about our forum spammer?

[André Somers]

Tomasz Siekierda schreef op 4-12-2014 15:07:
> Hi,
>
> I'm sure you know who I'm talking about: the impossible-to-reason-with 
> spammer that keeps polluting our forums with frequent moaning about 
> economists, Digia and profits.
Actually, I guess that is part of the problem: we do _not_ know who we 
are talking about. He is hiding in the TOR network, and using different 
throw-away email addresses. When there was still some disucussion with 
him going on, he refused to tell why he was doing what he is doing 
(assuming it is a "he" by the way), nor did he want to reveil his 
identity. He thinks what he is doing is peaceful protesting like handing 
out pamflets, I compared it to spraying grafitti everywhere or 
interupting completely unrelated debates or concerts with loudly voiced 
rants and then running away refusing to talk about it.
>
> He has grown significantly more active recently. We are banning him 
> swiftly, but he keeps coming back. In the last few days there's been a 
> real barrage from that individual, plus he started getting really 
> personal and insulting (not to say he was decent before, no no. He's 
> just worse than usual lately).
>
> Apart from - possibly - nominating new moderators (for example: p3c0, 
> Chris Kawa if they are not already), do we have any options? Has 
> anybody checked this guy's IP address? If it is static, we could ban 
> the IP, but most probably he is behind an ISP network with dynamic 
> addressing. Maybe we could ban the email address he is using (I 
> suspect he uses temp mail addresses, but just in case he does not) 
> from registering on the forum? Or will it end when somebody calls the 
> police (probably unlikely)?
>
> What are your opinions, proposals?
I don't think there are many options while the platform runs on 
Expression Engine. I understand it's not a very flexible platform, and 
it hard to hack into.

If were were not hindered by that, I would suggest a moderation queue. 
Messages may be marked for moderation by using some automated rules such 
as flag words in a combination, links outside of trusted sites, 
first-posts by accounts, but also by being explicitly marked for review 
by users. You could make that more fine-grained as well, for instance by 
requiring a minimum amount of karma/points in total by reporters before 
a message is moved to moderation queue, in order to prevent people being 
able to start annoying the forums by randomly marking loads of messages 
for moderation. Idealy, the existance of messages inside an existing 
thread would be visible, but the contents replaced by a message like 
"This message is under review." while the message is in the queue. New 
thread starts perhaps need different treatment.

However, until we have an engine capable of such things, there is not 
much we can do. I do suggest looking into the banning of TOR exist nodes 
though, especially for making new accounts. Perhaps we can look into if 
they are used legit at all. If not, I see little downside to blocking 
them for the time being.

André


>
> BR,
> sierdzio
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Web mailing list
> Web at qt-project.org
> http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/web

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/web/attachments/20141205/a5fe0e7f/attachment.html>