[Tracker-discuss] [issue105] Dealing with spam

Doug Napoleone Doug.Napoleone at nuance.com
Wed Mar 21 15:52:21 CET 2007


I would once again recommend using a service like akismet.com for new bug creation (comments should be less of an issue).
The honey pot system I outlined works well and catches 90% of the bots out there.
For the remaining 10% (~75 posts a month on average for the anime forum) a spam filter really is needed.

When the PyCon website/wiki rose in the google ranks, it was getting hit with 10 spam posts a day until PMWiki was updated to use a spam filter.
We were very lucky that only a few pages were targeted so it was mostly spam bots replacing spam with more spam.
e.g.: http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/Vendors?action=diff

I guess that got them mad because we later got hit with 10K+ attempts over 4 days.
Once you get on a bot networks list, things go south fast.

    -Doug

-----Original Message-----
From: tracker-discuss-bounces at python.org on behalf of Skip Montanaro
Sent: Wed 3/21/2007 7:00 AM
To: tracker-discuss at python.org
Subject: [Tracker-discuss] [issue105] Dealing with spam
 

Skip Montanaro added the comment:

Richard> On the email side the best thing to do would be to disallow
    Richard> email access for anonymous users. If anonymous email submission
    Richard> is allowed then human triage is the general method of filtering
    Richard> as automatic systems are error-prone and difficult to maintain
    Richard> (I'm actually unaware of anyone using the latter).

Right.  Most/all of these spammers are trying to get their links on blogs.
We are just independent bystanders caught in the crossfire.  If honeypot
fields were added it would be a good idea to name them the same as the
common comment textarea fields on popular blog hosting sites.

Skip

_______________________________________________________
Meta Tracker <metatracker at psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
<http://psf.upfronthosting.co.za/roundup/meta/issue105>
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________
Tracker-discuss mailing list
Tracker-discuss at python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tracker-discuss


More information about the Tracker-discuss mailing list