On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 03:00:16PM -0400, Henry Stern wrote: > > I propose that we create a subproject of Apache SpamAssassin to > encourage collaborative research in the area of anti blog spam with the > goal of producing cross-platform standards and implementations of > workable comment spam solutions. SpamAssassin's expertise of anti-spam > in the e-mail domain will complement the knowledge of the weblogging > community. >
My $.02. I agree that blogspam is bad and some sort of system that could leverage similar functionalities as SA could prove useful. I do however have reservations about it being an SA sub-project. If anything, perhaps a better project would be a spamd like server that you could feed blogposts/comments and it would return a score. It could still make use of some of SAs strongest core functions with small tweaks to accept a slightly different payload for checking. Here are a couple of reasons: 1) The vast number of blogging software packages, in different languages, for different platforms, and different APIs. I counterfeit this example with my idea above of a spamd like server, which could interface with any system, so long as it spoke the proper protocol. 2) Community/Expertise I have no doubt, that if done right, something like this would really take off and be used by a lot of people. It would have to be dumb simple to be used (drop in and go, with minimal config), because that is how much of the blogging software is today. My concern would be that while a significant user community exists, what is the development community like and how spread out it is amoungst the different packages. To my knowledge, only one of the core SA developers blogs with any frequency, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't use one of the mainstream blogging software packages. I won't speak for other developers, but it is likely that the expertise does not currently exist within the developers now. This means that an initial developer base would have to be established before any significant work could be done. The SA development community is very small, almost too small and was a concern of the board during our incubation (see board minutes for when we were voted out of the Incubator). Going into this with out a good development community is likely to lead to failure. If you look at the Incubator as an example, they do not like to take on project that do not already have an established set of committers. I would like to see several developer types step up and say, "Yes, this is a good idea and I am willing to put in the time and effort to make it happen." I think those developer types need to be familar with one or more of the mainstream blogging packages and/or willing to learn. Anyway, those are my thoughts. Like I said, it could turn out to be huge, but I'm not completely convinced that an SA subproject is the way to go. The seperate spamd like server appeals to me, because it could be used for a good number of other things, not just blog spam. Michael
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