Handling Spam

[Kadir Topal]

Hey all,

Last year we addressed the spam problem on MDN with 3 steps:
* We put the „create new page“ privilege behind a permission flag
* We implemented spam filtering with Akismet
* We implemented a way to quickly clean up after spammers.

Since then we have observed spam trends using the spam dashboard <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/dashboards/spam> and made adjustments, one adjustment was adding obvious non spammers who got flagged by the spam filter to the „known authors“ list thereby marking their submissions as okay every time. Unfortunately that only takes care of things for subsequent submissions, it’s still annoying for first time or infrequent contributions.

Since the amount of blocked spam is low and still outstripped by the number of blocked ham (messages falsely marked as spam), and we have a simple way to clean up after spammers, I think we should not block on detected spam any longer. Akismet would still flag things and we’d still review and watch the spam dashboard, but we’d stop annoying legitimate contributors and we’d always be able to turn blocking back on quickly in case we detect higher levels of spam.

I’m interested in hearing what people think about this. Whether this makes sense or reasons not to move forward as described.

Thanks!
Kadir