Spam Policy

[Justin Wood (Callek)]

>>Excessive linking and cross-posting will result in a rollback
removing the offending edits and a warning on the user's talk page. If
the incident occurs again, the user will be banned from editing
privileges.<<

Might I suggest the hazards of violating this policy NOT be exampled.

Lets take it on a case-by-case basis.

I have found good cause for simply warnings on other wiki sites, as
well as cause for a "one-day/one-week" ban. And as well as causes for
a "infinite ban for first offenders"...

Going with the "we'll slap your wrist first" statement in policy is
only cause for a "well I'll get my spam links out there for longer"
concept on the minds of serious offenders.

~Justin Wood (Callek)

[Owner]

Good suggestions. I didn't think of running it past you guys before I
put it up at the site. Will make some changes and post here.

[Naeya]

Actually, since you'll probably have something else to say about it,
how about you take a crack at writing it?

[Trel]

Most of the spam you will see will be robotic in nature, innocently
done, or maliciously added.

Robotic spam will come in the form of new signups with just one edit
to add spam. - Ban these immediately.

Innocently added spam might be links to a personal site with more
information or something of that nature. This can be handled on a case
by case basis as I can see where this might be acceptable behavior in
some cases as it could get more people to contribute.

Maliciously added spam will be off topic (not about DR or linked to
websites not about DR) and should be banned immediately.

I have a very low tolerance for spam and any spam policy should focus
solely on innocently added links. It should be a fairly simple policy
to write.

[Justin Wood (Callek)]

I feel that writing a policy should include "something" about
malicious spam. As in some countries it is a perfectly legit sign for
litigation, especially when coming from certain IPs.

As in, as long as we have a policy against it, the ISP can
theoretically detatch the user from their service, or risk litigation
themselves.

If a spam attack turns into a DoS attack on elanthipedia, is when
*this* particular fact can come in handy.

I *am* a sysop on the MozillaWiki [1] for example, (have been for a
while), and been contributing with Devmo [2] (Mozilla Developer Wiki)
in its early days of trials and tribulations, which is the only reason
I know about this sort of stuff.

~Justin Wood (Callek)

[1] http://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Special%3AListusers&group=sysop&username=
[2] http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Main_Page

[Trel]

Let me be more specific:

"any spam policy should focus solely on innocently added links."

This blurb is meant to say that any detailed policy should be written
to focus solely on "innocent" spammers rather than on spam that will
be added via robots. We can write in one or two lines to cover robotic
or maliciously added spam without any trouble.

"Any off topic or commercial edits or additions are not allowed on
Elanthiapedia.com and will not be tolerated. Offenders will be banned
at the sole discretion of Elanthipedia.com staff."

or similar.

As far as any other concerns I highly doubt any ISPs will ever
disconnect customers because of us sending reports. Email spam is the
#1 problem for most internet providers at the moment with billions of
spam messages being sent from PCs on high speed connections in the
United States. We would assume that these computers would be
disconnected when reported, but they rarely are even with mountains of
evidence as there are simply too many reports.

I've also sent reports about other attempted hacks against my servers
including servers attempting to brute force an SSH password without
much success.

The spam policy is more of a spam guideline rather than a legal
agreement. Under the existing Terms of Service we can stop providing
service to anyone at any time for any reason. ;)

On Mar 27, 10:21 pm, "Justin Wood (Callek)" <cal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I feel that writing a policy should include "something" about
> malicious spam. As in some countries it is a perfectly legit sign for
> litigation, especially when coming from certain IPs.
>
> As in, as long as we have a policy against it, the ISP can
> theoretically detatch the user from their service, or risk litigation
> themselves.
>
> If a spam attack turns into a DoS attack on elanthipedia, is when
> *this* particular fact can come in handy.
>
> I *am* a sysop on the MozillaWiki [1] for example, (have been for a
> while), and been contributing with Devmo [2] (Mozilla Developer Wiki)
> in its early days of trials and tribulations, which is the only reason
> I know about this sort of stuff.
>
> ~Justin Wood (Callek)
>

> [1]http://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Special%3AListusers&group=sys...

[Justin Wood (Callek)]

I like that concept of the policy, and I understand.

However I know of no ISP in the US that will refuse service based on
said reports, I do however know of a few overseas (not top of my head,
would have to look them up again).

And as far as ToS that may need changing too, I'll cover specifics
with that another day when I have more free time

~Justin Wood (Callek)

[Trel]

I've edited the TOU/Disclaimer and Privacy Policy as per research into
the subjects on the talk page and here.

The spam policy will need to be in clear plain English so people can
understand what we are talking about. I think this will be easy enough
to do once we have established the intent of each section.