Re: [Savannah-help-public] spam filtering on bug reports

[Jan Owoc]

Hi Karl,

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 5:12 PM, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Jan,
>
>>    I've received several spam messages from
> >   Savannah that were posted as comments on a bug I am tracking
>
> We should delete that user.  Please point us to the spam.
> Or you can flag it (if you didn't).

The spam is on bug 19367. I can imagine the same people posting on
many different bugs:
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?19467

I've just flagged all the comments as spam:


> Clearly the captcha is insufficient to prevent spammers from signing up,
> but I've already said everything on that subject I can think of.

I would imagine signing up might be done manually, but a bot then goes
to hundreds (thousands?) of bugs and posts comments.


>    In my (short) experience, few helpful comments have hyperlinks to
>    external documents -
>
> Disagree.

I had a very small sample size. If you say links can be helpful, then
I believe you.


>    Would an automated policy of rejecting posts with external links
>    (mostly) solve the problem?
>
> I think it would create more problems than it would solve.

What about a dedicated captcha for when the post contains a hyperlink
or is in "rich text"? I've seen a site have a captcha if there is a
link to the outside (so links to internal documentation or other bugs
don't trigger it). If external links are commonly used in real bug
reports, I don't know how else to stop the spam.

Jan