Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Temporary security measures — we apologize for the inconvenience

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Due to a recent rash of spam posting on this and other soapblox sites, we have instituted two (hopefully) temporary security measures:

  • New users must wait 1 day before they are allowed to submit user posts to the site; and

  • All users are limited to 2 user posts per day.

If things calm down, we’ll adjust the rules accordingly.  Sorry for any inconvenience.

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Comments

  1. An effective and more selective way of managing a spam attack (such as you describe here) was discovered by the wiki community a few years ago, when faced with a similar problem.

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    p>The first step — which is not too much more difficult than what you’ve already done — is to attach a “repost interval” to each user account, and double it upon each post. It allows most valid users to continue without too much inconvenience, while providing a relatively firm barrier for the abusers.

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    p>The second step depends to a great deal on whether or not the attack is targeted at specific threads. The idea is to attach a new “security code” field to a targeted thread. Trusted users (that’s another kettle of fish that we can discuss separately) are emailed the security code, and the effect of the security code is to bypass or reset the rate-limiter.

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    p>When you get a chance, it might be helpful to say a bit more about whether this attack appears to be motivated by the content here or whether it is more random cyber-vandalism.

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    p>Sometimes a favorable mention in a site like recent WaPo citation can attract undesired attention.

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    p>As with terrorist attacks, the effect (whether intentional or not) is to provoke the community into taking countermeasures that throttle or even destroy the community. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.

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    p>Some useful background might be provided by perusing the history at WardCunningham’s original wiki. In particular, some relevant pages include WikiVandals, GrammarVandal, ZeroTolerance, and MoreAboutCodes.

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    p>An interesting approach to “trusted users” and trust metrics was used for some time by the open-source Smalltalk community. A starting point for more information about trust metrics is the Trust Metric Wiki operated by trustlet.org.

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