On Sun, 2012-12-30 at 19:13 +0200, Jari Fredriksson wrote: > Seems to be a brain dead idea from JBoss/Red Hat to create such a system > in internet > > - web gui for discussions > This alone is bad enough if you don't do proper validation of would-be members. The WINE project, which also did user support through a linked web forum and mailing list had similar problems. They eventually solved it by decoupling the mailing list from the forum, with the result that the mailing list is almost unused these days. AFAIK they still need to devote considerable manual effort to turfing spammers off the forum.
The weakness seems to be that the forum is managed by a a company that commercialises WINE and provides considerable development for it, wants to make signing up as painless as possible which, of course, is effectively a conme-hither to spammers and similar low life. I have the strong impression that anything that makes registration take longer than a few seconds is enough to discourage most would-be forum spammers. For instance, requiring an e-mail confirmation of the user's online ID after the initial online application appears to do the trick, regardless of whether it works because the would-be spammer doesn't have an e-mail address, is unwilling to expose it or because the delay that introduces between signing up and being able to emit spam is too long for them. Martin
