I was giving this a little thought, and I think there are a few different milestones we can aim for here:
Milestone 1: Preventing a spammer from flooding email with dozens of posts in a single hour. Milestone 2: Preventing a spammer from flooding email with dozens of posts over the course of a weekend. Milestone 3: Total elimination of spam emails. Different techniques would be needed for each of these. Milestone 3, in particular, would require total human moderation of posts by probationary users, and may not be feasible for us. On a related note, it occurs to me that post rate throttling can't be a full solution to any of these, even Milestone 1. Even if we limited probationary users to, say, 3 posts per day, a spammer could simply register multiple accounts in order to circumvent that. We could try to throttle user registrations per IP or computer, but that's easily circumvented using proxies. On the other hand, a global post rate throttle could be useful. Like, if there are more than 3 posts by *any* probationary user in a 24 hour period, we start sending all probationary user posts to moderation. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Mahara Contributors, which is subscribed to Mahara. Matching subscriptions: Subscription for all Mahara Contributors -- please ask on #mahara-dev or mahara.org forum before editing or unsubscribing it! https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1250641 Title: [ongoing] mahara.org forum spam Status in Mahara ePortfolio: Confirmed Bug description: Mahara gets a steady annoying flow of forum spam. On a typical day it's 5 to 10 messages. This isn't a whole lot, but since the number of messages on mahara.org's forums is fairly low, this makes up about 40% of the messages each day. I'm opening this bug to explore options to deal with this issue. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1250641/+subscriptions _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~mahara-contributors Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~mahara-contributors More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
