Re: Make a barrier for users producing spam?
Posted: Sat Sep 07, 2013 4:12 pm
We actually have more action from RunRev here than you're giving credit for: as they continue their restructuring to facilitate ever broader community involvement, they have granted elevated privileges to a few people in very different time zones to help control forum spam.
It's likely they'll further this, but when it comes down to deciding who to grant those privileges to it becomes a decision whether to give the ability to ban potential legitimate accounts to those who are quick to anger, or those who maintain the sort of cool-headedness needed to apply such privileges very carefully. It's dangerously easy to try to take shortcuts on decisions like IP banning, and they need to know the folks doing it won't do it hastily, or because they disagree with a poster, or because they misunderstand a poster's poor writing to be a spambot.
In conjunction with the boatload of other things they're doing to expand community involvement, they've been working with community members like myself to evolve our role into one of a community liaison for forum moderation. So when you see me fielding questions and suggestions here, it's not because RunRev can't be bothered - very much the opposite, it's a part of the process they're actively engaged in, with the assistance of community members, just as we're seeing with the accelerated rate of engine development.
On this latest very good suggestion to simply turn off the Birthdays list, I don't mind admitting that it was such a simple solution that I'm embarrassed I hadn't thought of it myself. The alternative I was considering was much more time-intensive, and I've already noted how much I appreciated your suggestion and I'll gladly repeat that gratitude: thank you, it was indeed a very good idea, exactly the sort of thing that makes community involvement valuable for everyone. Like Linus said, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
While I do occasionally take a day off, most days I log in here several times a day to monitor spam. When I find it I delete it immediately, as do the other mods, and I take the time to do a geographic lookup on the IP and, where practical, block IPs from that range to prevent further activity. This is tedious, and as time-consuming for me as it would be for RunRev or any other volunteer, and it's apparently a thankless task as well. But I do it just the same because I understand that it just needs to be done, just as I do for the forums at LiveCode Journal and just as the army of mods do for the Ubuntu forums. As a result, only the most frequent visitors here ever see spam; most never see it at all, because it usually doesn't live for more than a few hours, often less.
I also coordinate with Heather and other RunRev team members as suggestions for improving the forums come up. It was through this coordination that I learned that the forum software is indeed up to date, and that the PHPBB copyright notice on the front page showing "2007" is merely a bug in PHPBB.
We've also discussed additional measures like enhanced CAPTCHA alternatives, though as I've noted before that won't stop the growing percentage of spam accounts that are created by humans under the Mechanical Turks project and others.
In addition to turning off the Birthdays list, other actions Heathers' taken as a result of our coordination have included limits on the interval between posts, and a minimum number of characters needed for posting. Limits on including URLs and attachments in posts until a certain number of posts have been made were also implemented, much earlier.
None of this is perfect, and no solution can possibly guarantee completeness. But working with the community, RunRev has indeed demonstrated a willingness to take action on good suggestions, and we''ll be seeing more of this as the details of community participation get worked out.
So while this process moves forward, I hope you'll continue to offer productive, actionable suggestions, and I'll do my best as a community liaison to make sure RunRev has a chance to consider them.
It's likely they'll further this, but when it comes down to deciding who to grant those privileges to it becomes a decision whether to give the ability to ban potential legitimate accounts to those who are quick to anger, or those who maintain the sort of cool-headedness needed to apply such privileges very carefully. It's dangerously easy to try to take shortcuts on decisions like IP banning, and they need to know the folks doing it won't do it hastily, or because they disagree with a poster, or because they misunderstand a poster's poor writing to be a spambot.
In conjunction with the boatload of other things they're doing to expand community involvement, they've been working with community members like myself to evolve our role into one of a community liaison for forum moderation. So when you see me fielding questions and suggestions here, it's not because RunRev can't be bothered - very much the opposite, it's a part of the process they're actively engaged in, with the assistance of community members, just as we're seeing with the accelerated rate of engine development.
On this latest very good suggestion to simply turn off the Birthdays list, I don't mind admitting that it was such a simple solution that I'm embarrassed I hadn't thought of it myself. The alternative I was considering was much more time-intensive, and I've already noted how much I appreciated your suggestion and I'll gladly repeat that gratitude: thank you, it was indeed a very good idea, exactly the sort of thing that makes community involvement valuable for everyone. Like Linus said, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
While I do occasionally take a day off, most days I log in here several times a day to monitor spam. When I find it I delete it immediately, as do the other mods, and I take the time to do a geographic lookup on the IP and, where practical, block IPs from that range to prevent further activity. This is tedious, and as time-consuming for me as it would be for RunRev or any other volunteer, and it's apparently a thankless task as well. But I do it just the same because I understand that it just needs to be done, just as I do for the forums at LiveCode Journal and just as the army of mods do for the Ubuntu forums. As a result, only the most frequent visitors here ever see spam; most never see it at all, because it usually doesn't live for more than a few hours, often less.
I also coordinate with Heather and other RunRev team members as suggestions for improving the forums come up. It was through this coordination that I learned that the forum software is indeed up to date, and that the PHPBB copyright notice on the front page showing "2007" is merely a bug in PHPBB.
We've also discussed additional measures like enhanced CAPTCHA alternatives, though as I've noted before that won't stop the growing percentage of spam accounts that are created by humans under the Mechanical Turks project and others.
In addition to turning off the Birthdays list, other actions Heathers' taken as a result of our coordination have included limits on the interval between posts, and a minimum number of characters needed for posting. Limits on including URLs and attachments in posts until a certain number of posts have been made were also implemented, much earlier.
None of this is perfect, and no solution can possibly guarantee completeness. But working with the community, RunRev has indeed demonstrated a willingness to take action on good suggestions, and we''ll be seeing more of this as the details of community participation get worked out.
So while this process moves forward, I hope you'll continue to offer productive, actionable suggestions, and I'll do my best as a community liaison to make sure RunRev has a chance to consider them.
Going forward I'll try to keep a keener eye to inherent weaknesses designed into the system.