Add better spam controls

If the had some kind of community governed central hub (krhm) - we could easily maintain a blacklist of bad pods that would be pulled in to all pods (opt-in) daily.

Even if we enable easy pod blocking in settings - it would not really help that much since it would require every single podmin to be active when bad pods appear.

Yes, because it can become a problem, I wanted to bring it up here, so we can think about a solution.

@jasonrobinson Do you think, it can be automated even further? So that all podmins would have to do is being up-to-date?

@jasonrobinson How about managing those lists via github? We could add lists of bad users and bad pods on diasporafoundation.org. Changing those lists could be done via pull requests on github and we could add a line in the config file where the podmin is able to enable the feature and specify the source of the blacklists.

@steffenvanbergerem sure that would work - as long as the podmin only has to activate the feature. Nice idea.

It would also be worth alerting the podmin if a spam account has either been invited by another account or has itself sent out invites before being closed, and giving the podmin the option to close these 'linked' accounts (and cancel the invites) as well as closing the spam account.

One thing which might be possible and which could help would be the inability to post the same comment more than twice in a set period of time. This would at least slow the spammers up and make it harder for bots to spam. Say, if you post the same comment (or within 95% the same, if it's not too difficult to do the logic for that) within a space of ten minutes, you then can't post a similar comment for a set period of time after that.

At least this would limit the reach any spammer can achieve, although it wouldn't stop them.

If someone does try to post a similar comment a third time, the podmin of their pod could be alerted to possible spam so they get chance to check it out and deal with it asap, rather than only finding out when another user complains.

@goob Before doing anything like that we should implement easy steps for podmins to remove a user which signed up on that specific pod including all posts and comments and all posts and comments already send to other pods. We should also implement an easy way for podmins to delete a user with all posts and comments from a pod and block future posts and comments from that user or from a whole pod. After that we can talk about what needs to be done to inform a podmin about spam accounts / spam pods.

Yep, I agree (said the same elsewhere). I'm thinking aloud about all the possible things that could be done to combat spam on the network.

Hm, I'm not sure, wether your last thought would work, since one has to assume a certain distance to another pod. So the time gap could be too inaccurate.

For me, we can collect ideas here meanwhile …