[ckan-discuss] Flagging SPAM

Fri Sep 2 13:46:49 BST 2011

David,
Thanks for the prompt response.

 To be honest, although we need to clean up spam users, we
> are much more interested in cleaning up spam packages.

Exactly, me too. But if a spammer stays alive, it can create more packages.
If the spam package creation is automatic, and the spam package flagging is
manual, then we have a problem.
By flagging users I intend to block them from creating new packages. This
would force spammers to create a new user and give us some time to breathe.
By the way, do we have a captcha for user creation?

I also think that an incremental approach could work very well here. Start
with a "Flag Spam" button that at least blocks packages from the front page.
Subsequently we can use the information gathered to train automatic spam
detectors. This is related to some work I do, and I would be glad to
implement the classifiers if you give me some training data (for example
collected from the spam button).

Cheers,
Pablo

On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 1:01 PM, David Read <david.read at okfn.org> wrote:

> On 2 September 2011 11:53, Pablo Mendes <pablomendes at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > It seems that the spammers are savvy enough to register one user per spam
> > package.
> > Examples:
> > http://thedatahub.org/user/aloshi
> > http://thedatahub.org/user/stevearlen
> > I would like to be able to flag a package along with its creator as
> > spam+spammer.
> > Are there any plans to introduce such a feature?
>
> Pablo,
>
> The tagging of packages is not ideal and we have no plans to add this
> to Users. To be honest, although we need to clean up spam users, we
> are much more interested in cleaning up spam packages.
>
> I've tried to start a discussion about ways to fight spam, starting
> with this ticket:
> http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/1257
> It would be great to get some suggestions about how to move this
> forward, for example whether to focus efforts on an admin tool,
> crowd-sourcing or automatic tools.
>
> David
>
> > Cheers,
> > Pablo
> > _______________________________________________
> > ckan-discuss mailing list
> > ckan-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-discuss
> >
> >
>
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