The forum volunteers would like to inform the PPMC of recent events and actions on the user forum. I offered to write this initial message since the moderators have had a long and frustrating day. I hope I avoid missing any important details. Spam postings have been an increasing problem this year as noted in Hagar's summaries posted on Jan. 31, Feb. 29 and April 1. http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=46497
In the last week and especially the week end, the problem has gotten so bad that the forum became nearly unusable. Hundreds of message would be posted in a few hours. Nearly all of the posts were for streaming video sites, with absolutely no attempt to disguise their intent. I personally saw more than 400 spam messages listed in response to the View New Messages link after being off line for less than 12 hours and moderators had probably been on line in the meantime deleting spam and banning users. Adding a dead time to user accounts so that messages could not be posted in rapid succession did not sufficiently reduce the spam. Today the registration process was briefly disabled to allow the moderators to remove messages and implement a user group for New Users. Hagar posted the following message: "I've taken some immediate action (sorry, unilateral but something had to be done to allow new users quickly): - I've reactivated the registration (by mail for the moment, not by mod) - I've activated the Newly registered and I'm restricting their permissions, preventing any BBCode - I've set the limit to 10 posts to get to the Registered status (not sure if it's automatic or not yet) Perhaps we should see how it works as a test. I think that the spammers do use BBCode for their links. If disabling it is enough, perhaps these basic counter measures will have some effect. Next step would be the moderation of posts from the Newly registered users." After these changes a few spam messages have appeared, but at a greatly reduced rate. This may be a result of the changes or just the time of day at the spam source. As Hagar stated in his message, the next step will be moderation of posts from new users. This is not a desirable action because it will make the forum less accessible and will greatly increase the moderator work load. If implemented, it may require the appointment of more moderators. I believe any suggestions from the wider Apache community for addressing this problem would be very welcome. Events have moved very quickly and there has not been time for the volunteers and moderators to have a thorough discussion of how to handle the new spam environment. Francis
