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Bug 327771

Summary:	Remove linkification from FUD Forums?
Product:	Community	Reporter:	Denis Roy <denis.roy>
Component:	Forums and Newsgroups	Assignee:	Forums and Newsgroups inbox <forums-inbox>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	P3	CC:	eclipse-bugs, Ed.Merks, russ, webmaster
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Bug Depends on:	292374
Bug Blocks:

Description Denis Roy

2010-10-14 09:29:25 EDT

The amount of SPAM coming in through the Web forums is getting obtrusive.  I believe the appeal lies within the fact that people can link to other sites.  Since eclipse.org is a high-enough-profile site, the incentive is that these links will help boost Google searches and such.

Each time SPAM comes in, I have to look up their account, disable it in Bugzilla, cancel the NNTP message(s) from an SSH shell, then delete the Forum message.  It's time consuming.

I'd really hate to kill functionality for the rest of the world, but this seems like low hanging fruit.  In any case, linkification doesn't happen for NNTP users.

I'm open to suggestions that don't involve spending a ton of time coding a complex solution.

Comment 1 Eric Rizzo

2010-10-14 14:36:24 EDT

What impact would there be on posting URLs in the content of messages? We often point users to useful pages such as wiki pages, other forum groups, ESR's Smart Questions page, etc.

Comment 2 Denis Roy

2010-10-14 16:39:37 EDT

That's a good point... Perhaps we could examine the link, and if it's not eclipse.org we don't make it a link?

Comment 3 Russell Bateman

2010-10-14 16:47:12 EDT

(In reply to comment #2)
We should think about this. There are many sites useful to refer questions to. My own and Lars Vogel's come to mind. Of course, I almost only ever post through NNTP, but if I were traveling and trying to keep up in the forums, I might post via the browser.

Comment 4 Ed Merks

2010-10-14 17:37:17 EDT

It sucks that losers make life more difficult for everyone to the point that we'd have to resort to this.

I suppose that some type of approval process for the first post would be onerous as well?  How many new posters do we have on a daily basis?  It would certainly be an opportunity to tell people that "please help" isn't a good subject line.

Comment 5 Denis Roy

2010-10-15 11:35:58 EDT

Yes, it sucks.  I'd like to preserve as much functionality as possible without wasting time deleting useless posts.

Forum has a feature to moderate new accounts (ie, they must be approved) but enabling that will likely turn out to be more work.

Since accounts have a creation date, one thing that may be possible is to not create links for posts where the account is created in the last 2-3 months.  This would allow us to trap SPAM posts without the links being useful, and scooped via Googlebot.

Comment 6 Russell Bateman

2010-10-15 11:45:26 EDT

Is it your impression that this is deliberate, "intelligent" spam? If not, then imposing that little wiggle where in order to post you have to type in characters from a distorted image would do the trick, no? That would not be too onerous for a browser-originated post. Most serious forum users come in via NNTP, I think. (Well, in fact, I DON'T know that, but it just seems right.)

Comment 7 Denis Roy

2011-04-13 14:32:46 EDT

The new version supports a 'moderation' period... I still have yet to see how it integrates with NNTP, but it is promising.

Comment 8 Denis Roy

2011-10-04 16:35:28 EDT

Our current setting of 5 posts before links seems to be working fine.  Closing.