[Python-Dev] Summary of Tracker Issues

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> I clicked on the tracker link out of curiosity noticed that the
> tracker has been spammed -- issues 1028, 1029 and 1030 are all spam
> (1028 seems a test by the spammer).
> 
> These issues should be deleted and their creator's accounts disabled.

(Notice that the spammer hasn't been as successful as he thinks -
 the spam downloads as plain text, not as HTML as he had hoped).

That's actually an issue that will like require continuous volunteer
efforts. Unless an automated spam filtering materializes (which may
or may not happen), people will need to clean out spam manually.

It's not that easy for a spammer to submit the spam: we require
a registration with an email roundtrip - which used to be sufficient,
but isn't anymore, as the spammers now have email accounts which
they use for signing up. We have some machinery to detect spambots
performing registration, and that already filters out a lot attempts
(at least the spam frequency went down when this got activated), but
some spammers get still past it.

Now it's up to volunteers to do ongoing spam clearing, and we don't
have that much volunteers. I think a single-click button "Spammer"
should allow committers to lock an account and hide all messages
and files that he sent, but that still requires somebody to implement
it.

Regards,
Martin