RSS and site spam - resolution coming very soon

[Jeffrey Warren]

I really apologize for the spam that's been hitting the site and especially the RSS feed recently - the web working group is working this week on better spam systems, so please be patient just a little longer. For the time being, we're catching them as fast as we can, and usually before they make it to the RSS feed.

The frustrating thing is that these are apparently real people who are getting past our automated-spam tests. So we'll start to do content-based filtering asap - probably with the Mollum module for Drupal. If anyone's interested in helping out, and knows Drupal pretty well, do drop us a line at w...@publiclaboratory.org.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Jeffrey Warren]

Thanks for input from those who responded.

We're ready to activate the Mollum module and fight back here... but I'd like to wait a day or two because we may have a lot of traffic to the site today (hold your breath, announcement soon!) so I don't want to rock the boat until that's passed. We'll just be extra careful at moderating for the next 48 hours, and once things have stabilized I'll throw the switch on this extra filtering.

Jeff

[Jeffrey Warren]

OK - thanks for your patience. I'm activating the Mollom anti-spam module now and will test with a fake post about selling discount diamond rings (trying to sound spammy, haha)

Anyhow Mollom reads content and analyzes it for spamminess -- but at least for now, any posts identified as spam will be sent to our moderators for double-checking to avoid false positives. So if your content does not immediately get posted, get in touch with moder...@publiclaboratory.org to see if it was incorrectly filed.

Fake spam test going out now... fingers crossed!

Best,

Jeff

[Jeffrey Warren]

OK, my diamonds post was flagged but not stopped. Apparently Mollom learns, though. Let's let it run for a few days and see -- it also knows to block certain known spammers, so we'll see what happens.

At the very least we'll gather some statistics on our spam problem :-)

Jeff