[drupal-devel] Dealing with spam

[Chris Messina]

(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 at timaltman.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 23:46:09 -0800, Chris Messina
> <chris.messina at 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
> 
>