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Ticket #670 (new new feature)

Opened 3 months ago

Last modified 3 months ago

Proposition : create a Captcha to reduce Spamming

Reported by:	jeanyves	Assigned to:
Priority:	minor	Milestone:	unassigned
Component:	BW Mail	Version:
Keywords:	Spam Captcha	Cc:
Follow up needed:	none	Frequently reported:	1
Announce on BW:	0

Description (Last modified by midsch)

This is a proposition (and something which can be prepared as an independent task)

The idea is to make a Captcha mandatory when a member wants to contact another members under certain conditions :

For now I see two conditions :

a member who have not yet any positive comment and who is sending a message to another one with the same text as a previous message sent to another member : Captcha. This will reduce the Spam done by copy/paste and the not personal message.
a member who have a Flag (given by Safety Team) !ForceACaptcha, will have a Captcha (to reduce his bad ways of sending to much messages, or if he is suspect of being a potential spammer but in a borderline situation (not enough to be kicked), all of this being decided by the Safety Team.

Change History

08/17/08 12:31:10 changed by midsch

description changed.

Is this really useful? If a spammer not mind all the work to visit profiles, copy & paste the mail, click the little "i agree"-checkbox and press return, you won't stop him with a captcha. Easy workaround for this proposal: setup a second account and write a positive comment for the first.

A forced captcha for a potential spammer marked by the security team? Don't you think, if the captcha is an annoyance, the spammer would just set up another profile (with a slightly different strategy)? Which means the whole procedure to stop a spammer starts from the beginning. If the security team has a got hand on a spammer, it'd be more smart to let him go on with logging in and "sending" mails from his account, but blew the mails to virtual nirwana. So the spammer might loose his interest at all by never getting answers.

Nevertheless captchas might be useful at sign up if spambots try to auto-generate accounts.

(BTW: besides this being a very inconvenient way to send out a little bit of spam - compared to usual ways where a spammer sends out 100k mails and more - there have been a lot of talk about fighting spam without really having any.)