(cc'ing Matt Mullenweg) Well the idea in coordinating our efforts to fight spam comes down to: 1) leveraging the huge open source community: the spammers are a large community in and of themselves -- surely with our collective efforts, we can stay one step ahead of them? perhaps we could even develop new spamming techniques just to eradicate them! 2) show that open source processes work for solving real world problems 3) show that OS is "growing up" 4) protect our websites from spammers (we're all vulnerable after all) 5) we all stand to benefit collectively by obsoleting spammer's tactics -- if only Drupal or WordPress has spam protection, then there are still other OS platforms out there that are vulnerable 6) the anti-spam project could serve as a model for future collaboration There are plenty more benefits, but those strike me off the top of my head. Chris On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 08:59:29 +0100, Tim Altman <web@timaltman.com> wrote:
On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 23:46:09 -0800, Chris Messina <chris.messina@gmail.com> wrote:
I would like to go out on a limb and propose that we coordinate an effort to create an open source anti-spam solution that can easily be ported to the various OS CRM/Blog platforms, is centrally coordinated (possibly by Drupal, but it really doesn't matter who takes it) and provides best practices and avoidance techniques for website administrators.
Sounds like a great idea. One possible downside is that it might become easier for spammers to target all participating projects if we're using nearly identical solutions. But I think the benefits outweigh that.
-- Tim Altman