I think Tori needs captcha badly…
Totally agreed.
(I write this while another wave of spam is coming into the forum)
If it’ll be done I would request a captcha though which doesn’t make you, as a non-robot, question your entire existence because of the fact that they are so cryptic. I saw a few which weren’t based on the squigly-line pictures which worked quite well, though i can’t remember a website that had them on top of my head.
Another possible (though probably more difficult to realize) solution could be things like:
- A Moderating system similar to sites like stackoverflow where normal non-vaadin-employee users can remove Spam posts if having enough reputation
- Making Marked as Spam more efficient. Either by automatically removing the marked posts if a specific amount of people marked it without reviewing it
- Adjust (or create if it doesn’t exist) the spam filter to be more aggresive towards 100 similar post containing spam posted over the course of a minute
There are more but that’s what i could come up with right now and most of them are probably too complex to implement here.
I wouldn’t think as cryptic. Simplest solution is the best. Putting answering a captcha before posting a topic or an answer will surely beat the spams. This is also implemented in other forums I know.
Just to note – the spam problem has been noted at Vaadin. The Tori developers may be busy with other things right now, so they might not have an opportunity to add a proper filtering mechanism immediately. In any case, the latest attack seems to have stopped now.
Captchas are one solution, but should be really light on the brain; preferably even unnoticeable, such as some JavaScript/GWT solution that tracks mouse/keyboard. The spammers are maybe using some browser automation tool that also works in AJAX apps (Tori is a Vaadin app).
That or more strict captchas don’t help a bit if the spams are done manually, as they probably are to some degree – there’s already one simple captcha in vaadin.com registration. Labour is sometimes cheaper than robots. A scoring or user moderation system, perhaps something like Marius suggested, would probably be a good idea.
I’d really like to have
CAPTCHA like the one here
. That would be so educational…
That captcha is so educational indeed!
Liferay (for which vaadin.com is based) has the same issues with spam on their forums, but they solved it by integrating antispammy and some other tools.
I don’t know it is an issue for Tori as much as it might be an underlying platform issue.
I just stumbled over this ux.stackexchange question which has a few nice alternatives like drag&drops, etc.
http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/50051/is-there-an-easier-and-more-user-friendly-alternative-to-captcha
The 3rd answer has a few alternatives linked.
I have this feeling though that some of the spam attacks might have been from humans copy and pasting the same text and creating multiple threads by hand. A Captcha won’t really stop them.
That’s why I’d love the Scoring/User Moderation system.
Another little but easier way to make it slightly better might be a limit of posts you can create in a set amount of time. No normal user would create 10 threads in 10 different categories over the course of half an hour