On page 1 AlanCollier suggested 'people power' vs spam sentiment by relying on an "active community of moderators". Its funny because about 2 post before his I was wondering the same thing.
I mean, some forms of automation may be helpful, but the challenge seems to be how to not be bogging down the systems and administrators with complex automated utils that then require more sophisticated administrative management, and don't totally serve becasue they cannot 'think' on their own well enough). (sigh - @#$%@ BOTS!)
Maybe something really simple like using an "automated system for creating and managing an internal-network of would-be moderators out of existing members" would actually provide a smart and low overhead defense?
But we already have moderator group availability you say...
Maybe it would work something like this (and maybe this would be different?):
- Create criteria for allowing members who fulfill the criteria to join 'anti-spam moderator group'.
- Obviously it would have to be a system based in/on trust... (but consider, trust is a human characteristic bot-spam will probably never have or be able to emulate/automate (in our lifetimes anyway?), thus a system based in trust might well be a most powerful and simple tool (if we could figure out the best way to be leveraging that)...
- Those qulaifying to elect to volunteer to join this anti-spam moderator group would only have the responsibility and priviledges for deleting spam-posts, and possibly even spam-members (however you choose to set the criteria for that). They would not have any other moderator priviledges. (Some sort of checks and balances system could be discussed and sussed out for what might be the best ways for managing the members of this group, of course.)
- The idea here would be to enable the ability for the automated evolvement and maintenance of a virtual network of human thinking anti-spam tools (every fool is a tool, eh?). (As opposed to the automated evolvement and maintenance of all sorts of blacklists and such (for ips, urls, words, ad nauseum) which isn't really so automated, because the minute you build something to think a certain way, it starts becoming outdated (but a basically intelligent human being seem sto always recognize what spam is or isn't ;^)...
It seems this is the sort of "feature-set" for a forum that would require very little:
- very basic modification to the forum itself,
- without requiring continual updates and maintenance of a/some utility(s) (because its not an anti-spam, or group of, anti-spam utilities, it would be a simple feature),
- as membership grows, the shear number of people-force would prpbably outweigh the ability of the spam-bot force out there to be potentially overwhelming or taking down your system(?),
- and then who knows what other way-more simple protection tools might evolve to for enabling better leverage of/for the human driven anti-spam-moderator group?
- oh, and it may allow for additional usage of other existing anti-spam tools with less maintenance overhead?
???I wonder???
Does this really sound all that -stupid- or -unviable-?
Am I overlooking something obvious that renders this idea 'a non-idea'? (Maybe this was thought out in the stone-henge days of anit-spam dev, and they tossed it because...?
...added later-however, I know they're thinking about this art punres, because I just went there and read this http://www.punres.org/viewtopic.php?id=1848 ;^P
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What do you think?
And if its a good idea, then maybe this feature capability should be built into 1.3, if only to facilitate the potential viability to prove itself out or not - lets see who uses it and how well it adapts to fighting spam?
Cheers,
Twohawks
PS: if you think I got my head up 'it', please be gentle pulling out, okay?