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1 Sep 05, 2005 19:18    

Make it so that people have to update there blacklist before they can report new spammers.
For the ones keeping the blacklist up to date (like me) it's a tough job to deprecate all those spammers (because 1 good spam-word was choosen to avoid 200 other adressen).

2 Sep 05, 2005 19:20

We could do that based on the last updated date.
How much should we tolerate? 1 week?

If we make it too long, people will still report irrelevant spam.
If we make it too short, they won’t be able to report spam if we don’t update the list on our end.

A better way would be to has a date with “last checked” and force that to less than an hour or sth like that, but it’s a little more work to implement ;)

3 kwa Sep 28, 2005 14:44

kwa

I don’t agree with that request. I emptied my 3,000 keyword blacklist because it was too long and a few tens of spammers were spamming my blogs. Test long blacklists is CPU time consuming. My host complained about my CPU usage…

However, I still reporting new spammers and even if I update my antispam blacklist on a regular basis, I remove all the new keywords one by one. Updating, then removing all the new keywords would do the same as reporting new spamming keywords without updating the antispam blacklist…

4 Oct 04, 2005 19:54

The problem with saying “your local copy is more than N days old” is that we are obligated to publish a new spammer within that time frame. Once I recall a case where central wasn’t updated for quite some time, so, if a time limit based on last update was implemented it would be possible for no one to report. Another issue is that updating the blacklist won’t purge the hitlog table of all hits that would have matched. Therefore the person who has an up-to-date list will still have spam in their logs, and should still report those ‘referers’ they deem spam.

I suggest altering the message(s) the reporter sees each time they report. If they do not have the latest update time stamp (or something reasonably close…) they get “thanks for reporting/adding - and UPDATE YOUR LIST!!!". I suppose it would take including the settings value as part of the update, which won’t help those on an older version, but it’s a potential step for the future.

Another idea along these lines is probably more complex than this topic allows for, but I’ll throw it out anyway. If a reported term is not explicity in the blacklist but would have been blocked by a published keyword the user should get a prompt telling them it’s already covered by “nnnnn” but thanks for adding to the report for that specific term. This way the user can see that blahblah-foo-bar.spammer.tld is already banned by -foo-, and *maybe* figure out there’s more layers to this onion than meets the eye.

Back on track: Now that I’m on the inside I embrace topanga’s concern with the difficulty of dealing with new reports that would have been banned by an up-to-date keyword list. Clearly, from a central list management perspective, something needs to be done to educate the users and deal with new domains that are already covered.

Bottom line: whatever you do, please think about the new user who doesn’t know all the ins and outs and is trying to take part in the Great Battle. Anything that stops them from reporting might make them decide to not play at all, but something that informs them will probably make them a better player.