We have a spam problem

[petr]

Hi Frank,
I understand that all this spam is annoying. On the other hand, it should not be made too hard to provide the first ticket neither, otherwise people get discouraged and we might loose valuable feedback. There is already quite some extra effort needed to register to a bug tracking system, to understand who it works, to search with this new system for tickets, to do the best to comply with project's guidelines, etc. So making it too hard to contribute also might discourage people. Therefore the measures should be evaluated also in this sense.




On 19 Sep 2014, at 17:05, Frank Schima <mf2k at macports.org> wrote:

> 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]
I guess a captcha would be acceptable for new or occasional users, but we should have be able to whitelist frequent contributors.
>  - Implement a rather onerous password policy to make it harder to sign up. Right now we have no password policy.
"harder to sign up" does not sound great, but some password policy is okay I guess. However, would this help to avoid spamming?
> - Delay maybe 30 minutes before sending out the verification email.
- delay? We I usual like to get my job done. Not returning to a problem later;
> - 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. 

mark spam will not influence reporter experience.
>  - 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.
Probably, okay for first reports
> - 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.
Involves some extra work. Is it less then marking spam?

 
> 
> 
> 
> Thank you,
> Frank

~petr



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