[AppDB]: Recent UCE/Spam waves in AppDBs comments

[Rosanne DiMesio]

On Sun, 28 Apr 2013 02:02:18 +0200
Joerg Schiermeier <news at Schiermeier-IT.de> wrote:


> I just saw again a lot of spam posted into the AppDB.
> Thanks to Rosanne who deleted this senseless and useless mails
> rapidly.
> But isn't there a real solution for this problem?
> OK, to kill this guys maybe the best way, but than I will get seriously
> problems. :-) So please, isn't there a way to set up a filter - for
> user names or, with more effect, for IPs of this bad guys ISPs?
> I know, this will cause 'collateral damage' but if it helps to prevent
> the next wave of spam - I think it's OK.
> 
> This maybe a task for AppDBs administrator, isn't it?
> 

Joerg,

As frustrating as it is for admins not to have the ability to ban AppDB spammers, my experience with spam on the forum tells me that banning alone, at best, barely slows down the determined ones. Ban one username, they will create another. Ban one IP, they will use a different one. The only thing that got spam under control on the forum was the forced moderation of posts by new users. We still get spammers trying, of course, but once they see that their post will never appear, most move on to easier targets. Unfortunately, the AppDB is one of them.

Forced moderation of comments could work for apps with maintainers who are doing their job, but most of the spam I recently deleted was in unmaintained apps. My suggestion would be to block comments altogether on unmaintained apps, not just because of spam, but because of other inappropriate things that are not being monitored, such as posting links to illegal downloads. As for the maintainers who clearly aren't doing their jobs (about 20-25% of the spam I found was in entries with maintainers), admins already have the capability of removing them.

Of course, making either of those changes would depend on someone with the requisite skills caring enough to take the time to modify the AppDB code. I fulfill the latter but unfor


-- 
Rosanne DiMesio <dimesio at earthlink.net>