I am thinking about the future and the tools that this environment will use to grow. One thing that is a real growing pain is spam in its different forms. As the popularity of a web site increases the amount of spam in its various forms increase.
- What do you think would be some good ways to fight spam in this community?
- What tools would be helpful to report and stop spam?
Comments
There are a few things already in place:
-comments are restricted to registered users. this cuts out a lot of "drive by" or bot spamming
-registration is done via email confirmation, so requires authentic email and human interaction
-wiki is limited to read-only unless you are logged in
-resource (link) sbmission is moderated to prevent spamming
One possibility to enhance is the use of akismet filtering (www.akismet.com) or captcha (both are easily added to elgg.
Another neat new approach is this one:
http://damienkatz.net/2007/01/negative_captch.html
The negative captcha is an awesome idea. It doesn't add an extra layer for humans only for bots.
I'm just thinking about the future. What I have found is mass registrations when spammers target a Open Source or other server software, and then spam with registered accounts. This has happened when using Simple Machines forums for me many times as well as blogging and CMS. I am constantly cleaning up the forums here - http://www.thecanadianteacher.com/forum/ I recently added a captcha to the registration process - and that seemed to help quite a bit.
Yes, but the hole has been blocked now. I left the back door open when I did some upgrades. Oops. Locked tight now.
./tim