Spam Quarantine

[rodmcleay]

I don't now how posible or practicle this would be but, could there be somekind of quarantine for suspected spammers.
ie.

If someone is obvioulsly sending spam (eg horny girl want you!) then any user or user of a certain level could "report them" to a process that would suspend there emails until someone official from wrox can investigate.

If we let them get out a few, like 'naishi' has, then more will follow but if they have to enrol with a different email address each time only to get instantly suspended they will stop trying.

I am assuming that 'naishi' will be suspended in one form or another but the time difference between spamming and suspension is an issue.

An issue that any responsible wrox user in the southern hemisphere can limit the effects of.

Rod.

======================================
They say, best men are moulded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad.
======================================

[David Cameron]

This is a great idea, particularly as the problem may grow from here. Looking at the posting times for naishi's messages the messages seem to have been manually posted. However there isn't a whole lot of effort involved in writing a perl script (or pick your language of choice) to post to a forum multiple times.

Incidentally the more widely used snitz is the more of a problem this is likely to be, due to the fact the page names and form field names are going to be the same. Someone out there will release some code to automate posting.

Some suggestions:
1. Examine the time between postings. If two messages are posted by the same person within a certain time period assume that they are not human posted. Increase the minimum time when the posts are in different forums as it takes more time to leave one forum and go to another.
2. Some sort of spam filter. In checking whether a message is spam it might be worth checking: age of membership, number of posts and a dictionary of words. Putting that together you could work out some sort of probablility that the message was spam. I guess there might be some kind of bayesian filter out there for this kind of thing.

Feel free to point out any inaccuracies/impracticalities in my suggestions.

regards
David Cameron

[Hal Levy]

Integration might be possible (somehow) with Spam Assassin (http://spamassassin.org/index.html) However I have not investigated it. Perhaps messages that SA labels as likely to be spam could be somehow quarantined.

Hal Levy
Unemployed (Thanks GWB)
NOT a Wiley/Wrox Employee