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?