Add Stopforumspam Integration

Noticed a few posts regarding spam from a while back and recently as well. I’ve hosted several websites in the past and used to great effect https://www.stopforumspam.com/.

In case you are unfamiliar, stopforumspam is one of the several services that routinely reports and keep updated databse of spam/hack accounts, usernames, email addresses, and ip addresses. Diaspora does have a captcha function, which is nice. I wonder if it’d be a good idea to implement an anti-spam function for both signup and post (not sure how the post option would go as far as coding, seems like a big project…maybe not now but later).

Essentially it works like this:

  • User signs up for an account
  • Plugin/System checks user’s information against stopforumspam database
  • If anything is a match then two things happen:
    • They are blocked from signup
    • Their new information is reported to stopforum spam (same ip, different username, etc.)
  • If nothing matches, then they’re allowed through to create a new account.
  • If an established account is determined to be a spam account, it can be reported to stopforumspam

Thoughts, suggestions?

This means you’d block users from signing up because factors (some of which they don’t even have an authority over) are matching in some database, without a person’s intervention. I’m not sure this is a good way of dealing with this, especially since the spam problem has not yet actually been a problem really. I prefer to cross that bridge when we come to it.

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