We have a spam problem

[Frank Schima]

Hi all,


I just spent the last half hour closing about 40 spam tickets which arrived last night - most in a 15 minute period. We need to do something about the spam problem because it seems to be getting worse. I just tested creating a new account and only a simple email verification goes out. I tested that I could indeed not login until I clicked the verification URL that was emailed to me. What else can we do about this?

While I was wasting my time doing the same repetitive keystrokes on most of the spam, I have some ideas which might be nice:
 - Implement a captcha per ticket #42484 [1]
 - Implement a rather onerous password policy to make it harder to sign up. Right now we have no password policy. 
 - Delay maybe 30 minutes before sending out the verification email. 
 - Add a “mark spam” button to the wiki which changes the summary, description and keywords to “spam” and closes the ticket as invalid in a single click - maybe with a checkbox next to it to prevent mistakenly pressing it? Obviously only Macports committers should be able to do this. 
 - For all new accounts, have a 24 (48 or 72?) hour waiting period where the user can only create a single ticket or add a single comment. 
 - If we want to get serious, we could have the registration page have some fields such as “why are you creating an account?” and have all registrations be approved by a Macports committer. But that would be a last resort only. 


Thank you,
Frank

[1] <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/42484>