Noticeboard?

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Wed, Jun 8, 2016 at 8:39 AM, Alberto Salvia Novella
<es20490446e at gmail.com> wrote:
> Pasi Lallinaho:
>> The problem isn't with spambots, it's about microworkers (or
>> Mechnical Turks) who are able to pass many spam-preventing measures
>> much easier.
>
> Have you tried temporally banning by IP, city or country?

This wasn't one person from one country, it was all over the map. We
have legitimate contributorsall over the world, this would be
incredibly unfair to them.

>
> Pasi Lallinaho:
>> While there are clear cases where somebody is or is not a legimitate
>> contributor, there are definintely cases where this is not clear at
>> all.
>
> All the cases that came to my team followed a clear pattern: the accounts
> were created less than a week ago, joined plenty of teams in a few minutes,
> and had no meaningful comments in bug reports.

You were lucky. Our spammers started out that way but got smart
quickly. They joined other teams, sat on accounts for months before
using them (not just created less than a week ago). Some even signed
the Code of Conduct. They'd followed up by emailing the admins of the
team saying they work on Ubuntu and wanted access (but very poor
English with requests that made non sense often made it obvious that
they weren't legitimate contributors). It became almost impossible to
tell the difference between legitimate newcomers and spammers.

> In case of doubt, I will just ask the person to write to me directly.

I think you're failing to understand the volume of spam requests we
were dealing with. When you get scores of requests in a day for weeks
on end, this is not feasible unless you're willing to work full time
on it. I eventually gave up.

Ultimately it's not just a case of enough volunteers, it's
coordination of volunteers (who looks at which spammers? who replies
to emails to admin through launchpad? we don't want the same three
people investigating one spam account and ignoring 15 others). But
even worse, you're asking volunteers to spend 8+ hours a day on
researching and combating spammers. I'd much rather see your valuable
talents used elsewhere in the community, like actually helping us
improve the Ubuntu documentation.

As I said, in the long term I'd much rather find a team of volunteers
willing to do the work of coming up with a less manual solution,
whether that means doing research and working with IS to move to a
platform that has better control for spammers or some other solution
we haven't thought up yet.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2