[geeklog-devel] Anti Spam Features

[Tony Bibbs]

As noted in the forums of Geeklog.net it appears a growing trend is the 
spamming of blogs.  With Geeklog a big player in this arena I think we 
would be wise to start thinking up ways to implement anti-spam measures.

I think the start would be to be able to mark comments as spam.  When a 
comment is identified as spam I think the IP should be logged.  In the 
config.php file I think we could then set a spam threshold at say 5. 
What that means is if a an IP is tied to spamming the Geeklog site five 
times then we would ban that IP.  I know using IP's isn't the greatest 
but my hunch is 99% of this sort of spam would come from static IP's and 
not proxy IP's.  However, we should still allow admins to turn this 
feature on or off.

One other bit of useful logic would be to check if the source IP of spam 
has been tied to comments which weren't identified as spam.  If we did 
that then in our logic we could basically check a) has the IP hit the 
threshold, if so has it been used in non-spam comments.  If it *has* 
been used in non-spam comments then we could assume it is from a proxied 
IP and not ban the IP.

I also think later versions of this could use MySQL's full text 
searching capabilities.

To start, if we were to add the IP to the comment table I think we could 
write a plugin to do all this.  OF course this assumes that a plugin API 
is called when a comment is submitted which may or may not be the case ( 
I can't remember).

I'm sure you guys may have other ideas too.

-- 
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Tony Bibbs         |[R]egardless of what you may think of our penal   |
|tony at tonybibbs.com |system, the fact is that every man in jail is one |
|                   |less potential fisherman to clutter up your       |
|                   |favorite pool or pond. --Ed Zern                  |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+