1905292 - Hide spam content to discourage spammers

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: Bug Creation/Editing, task)

Description

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Now that we have history on the comments, we should remove the content of comments marked as spam.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1894702#c4
For example, even if this comment is marked as spam, it is still visible (even if not logged in bugzilla).
I am afraid it is encouraging spammer to still publish such spam, hoping that some referencing bots will still index it.

(I am also wondering if indexing robots will not think that we aren't doing a good job with spam detection)

Comment 1

[BMO Github Automation]

Attachment: [mozilla-bteam/bmo] Bug 1905292 - For comments tagged as spam, remove the content (#2269)

Comment 2

[:glob ✱]

Pulling in my review comment for visibility:

With this change if a comment is accidentally tagged as spam its contents will immediately be removed, without any feedback to the user that anything has happened - they won't notice the content is gone until the next time they reload the page.

The content removal should happen after a delay of at least 5 minutes.

Additionally, as the goal of this bug is to hide spam content from search engines, viewing a comment's history if the comment is tagged as spam should require authentication.

An alternative approach that will be less destructive and easier to implement would be to filter out comments tagged as spam from the comment list for all users without editbugs - including unauthenticated requests and the commenter (where appropriate).

We wouldn't need to put it on a delay as it's trivial to revert and we wouldn't have to take any extra measures to hide the comment history from search engines.

Comment 3

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

(In reply to :glob ✱ from comment #2)

An alternative approach that will be less destructive and easier to implement would be to filter out comments tagged as spam from the comment list for all users without editbugs - including unauthenticated requests the commenter (where appropriate).

We wouldn't need to put it on a delay as it's trivial to revert and we wouldn't have to take any extra measures to hide the comment history from search engines.

As this will be less complex to implement than one with a time delay, I will make a new patch using this approach.

dkl

Comment 4

[BMO Github Automation]

Attachment: [mozilla-bteam/bmo] Bug 1905292 - Hide spam content to discourage spammers (#2272)

Comment 5

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

Merged
https://github.com/mozilla-bteam/bmo/commit/feb14a3e38831ba2d30f5201442d99e460427086