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Submitted by Alaa on Tue, 01/03/2005 - 09:59.
( categories: Website )

what to do with anonymous comments:

  1. queue them until moderator approval
  2. use spam filtering or captcha
  3. just publish them and remove spam later
  4. omraneya queue

although I'd like to point out that this right now is a purely technical problem, when we first decided to put anonymous through moderation queue it was to help maintain the AUP without putting huge effort on administrators (we had no large moderator team back then), but now the main reason to keep doing that is spam.

anyone who is running a modestly linked blog site knows how big a problem comment spam is, one by one we all had to put anonymous comments in the queue.

now this is not fun, it certainly puts a limit on free speech (EGLUG is not a free speech area according to our earliest policy poll after the infamous motorola motem post) but its a sad fact we are all living, email si becoming more and more complicateds due to spam, there are no perfect solutions for this.

cons to spam filtering:

  1. consumes loads of server resources
  2. may hit legitimate comments, mods still need to go through the unpublished comments
  3. may miss spam comments, mods need to go through all comments to kill spam

cons to captcha

  1. extremly annoying
  2. drupal captchas rely on simple arethmetics to avoid accessability problems and consuming way to much resources, will expose anyone with very poor concentration or arithmetics skills (is that a pro?)
  3. difficult to explain
  4. will probably get us more angry troll comments

I'm open to other suggestions.

cheers, Alaa

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I'm still allowing anonymous
MohammedSameer's picture
Submitted by MohammedSameer on Tue, 01/03/2005 - 12:33.

I'm still allowing anonymous comments without approval on foolab, And it seems that it didn't interprete a comment in a wrong way until now, Thanks to the excellent spam.module. I have no idea about the server resources but it seems OK to me. However If you are saying that the spam.module is resource intensive then I suggest not running 2 spam.modules on the same server ;)
So keep it as it is now.
!!!


-- I was known as Uniball!
WWW: http://www.foolab.org/
Quote "c u next life time then when i come back as a mug of tea :P"


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You're the man :P
ShErbO's picture
Submitted by ShErbO on Wed, 02/03/2005 - 00:09.

Well if the spam module is really good (like 9x % accurate or something) and not resource intensive then why not. Otherwise I think the approval queue would be fine. What's wrong with approval ?? It IS anonymous after all..


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I have no idea about the resources.
MohammedSameer's picture
Submitted by MohammedSameer on Wed, 02/03/2005 - 04:39.

the spam module wasn't able to detect 8 comments of 2656. I think this is a very small fraction, And after I've trained it everything went back to normal.

-- I was known as Uniball!
WWW: http://www.foolab.org/
Quote "c u next life time then when i come back as a mug of tea :P"


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Ignore User/Hide Post
Submitted by systems on Wed, 02/03/2005 - 15:18.

I think this purely a resource issue, eglug have limited disk storage resources, and we cannot keep spam stored.

Problem is, spam is as they say in the eye of the beholder. If I can hide posts I consider as spam I have no problem, as far as I care problem is solved.

For example, when I selected several message in my hotmail account and click the button "this is spam", those messages disapear, I dont really care, if they are still stored, but if I have a pop3 account and store email message on my disk i would want em really removed from my disk

I think we can use to collectively fight spam, the user can mark a message as spam, and it should disappear from his screen only, other users will see it, if a message hit a certain spam count it can be physically deleted from disk, spam count should be visible to all users, and user should be allowed to revote on the message, this will give the opportunity to legit poster to defend their messages if they see it reached the deletion mark

by doing this we can eliminate the need for moderators, we only need to agree on a reasonable spam count!

but as long as we have moderators, we must allow anonymous post, to put controversial posts anonymously

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we shall vote on this
Alaa's picture
Submitted by Alaa on Thu, 03/03/2005 - 20:01.

the following members second the vote

  1. Alaa
  2. YoussefAssad
  3. Darkness_Wolf
  4. Whirlpool

this amounts to 30 ballots, the upcoming poll is a decision poll.

cheers, Alaa

http://www.manalaa.net "i`m feeling for the 2nd time like alice in wonderland reading el wafd"


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