Re: [GMG-Devel] Trac Spam Information from People at #trac on IRC

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Amelia Rose Khan writes:

> Hello all,
>
> I have asked in the #trac irc channel and got some information on this
> which is below.
>
> Trac people pointed me to http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/SpamFilter for spam
> registration but I thought someone already installed and enabled this. A
> good way to check this out is in spam filter monitoring within the plugin
> for trac.
>
> I have asked Chris (paroneayea) and Simon (simonft) who have given various
> answers but would be good if people can start to register on Trac again.
>
>
> If there is more information, I need to find please let me know.
>
>
> Amelia Rose (First Name)

Sorry to take so long to reply, and thanks for looking into this,
Amelia Rose!

I'm still not certain about what to do about the spamming situation on
Trac.  I probably won't have time to look at it over the next couple of
months.

The above linked wiki page was what I looked at (the SpamFilter one).  I
put a bunch of time into it, we set up a bayesian filter, but a lot of
the behaviors of the software are confusing.  I think it's hard to tell
when you've moved a ticket to spam/ham for the sake of the bayesian
filter, and when you've actually deleted it, as one example.  I tried
putting up captchas on registration but nobody seemed to see them.

I spoke to a friend who has run several Trac instances and she told me
"the only way to run a public trac instance is to hand out registrations
manually", which seems... sad for contribution purposes.  I hope it's
not true.

If anyone here has experience with running a Trac instances successfully
with anti-spam provisions well... I'm very interested in hearing about
that.

 - Chris