[drupal-devel] Dealing with spam (was rel=nofollow)

[Chris Messina]

These parts are of particular interest to me:

> What I don't like about exchanging hard rules is that you will end up
> with a unified database of urls, regexes, whatever... 
> Hard rules, means clever peolple will find a way around
> them - just look at the progress of the email spam fight.

> In the short run the regex exchange is going to work. 
> Its downside is the downside of every overtrained
> learning algorithm. It looses precision big time, especialy in an
> evolving system. It does not adapt well.

> A brief comparison: regex exchange - surgery; content exchange between
> learning systems - holistic medicine. 

I was thinking some more about these adaptive filters that learn and
the sharing of spam posts/comments between sites. It seems to be like
the p2p model would work really well in this case.

Just as we had proposed doing a sort of "trusted sites" system where
you exchange regexps with your trusted network of sites (which, to my
thinking, seems inherently *more* risky than just dealing with spam
locally), the way that we could leverage spammers' own behavior would
be to syndicate an unpublished feed between trusted sites of ONLY spam
content.

I mean, that way, if someone taps your "spam feed", who cares?! BUT,
if Drupal can tap into Spread Firefox's spam.rss feed, Drupal's
learning filters would learn that much faster -- and in real time,
because as SFX gets hit, Drupal would have the content from the feed
which has been pre-identified as spam. Thus when and if the spammer
moves to Drupal, Drupal will be one step ahead of them, having learned
from SFX.

Thoughts?

Chris