463656 - Make it harder to spam with reviews

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 537105

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Public Pages, defect)

Description

[Dave Garrett]

There have been a few users who have posted spam in 25-50 reviews for different add-ons. (i.e. 47+ in bug 462449) There are ways to delete them, but I think it shouldn't be so easy to spam this much in the first place. Users can also just make a new account and keep on going. (bug 463653 & bug 458144) I'd like to propose a few ideas that might be useful to slow the problem:

1) Restrict the amount of time allowed between posting reviews. Maybe even have the wait time go up each review, so it's a 15 second wait, then 30, then 60, then 2 minutes, etc. Users shouldn't be able to quickly post large amounts of reviews all at once.

2) Ban reviews with "http://" or "https://" or "ftp://" in them. Search for the strings and reject with an error if one is found. Yes, it'll only be a link if the user has something like the Linkification extension installed, but most spam wants you to go to their site so this should help here.

3) Detect when a user posts the exact same review to multiple add-ons. Spammers are usually going to be too lazy to make varied postings, and even if they try to vary things this would slow them down.

4) Flag users that violate the above and auto-notify moderators to let them investigate further.

I think something should be done here or the problem is just going to get worse. A minimum time between postings seems like the minimum here.

Comment 1

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

1) I don't think that's feasible.
2) We don't turn those into links, so it's not too bad.
3) Maybe.
4) We already allow registered users to flag reviews for moderation.

I'm marking this as a dupe of bug 448721. This is going to be our review spam solution for the future.

Comment 3

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

(In reply to comment #1)
> I'm marking this as a dupe of bug 448721. This is going to be our review spam
> solution for the future.
I think that given the amount of spam accounts we've been seeing, this problem is going to get worse instead of better.  Why isn't (1) feasible?

Comment 4

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

Having variable time limits is complicated to implement, and would not be worth the effort IMO.

Bug 537105 is where the current discussion on review spam is being held.

Comment 5

[Dave Garrett]

Personally, I think #2 above is the best way to go. Spam inherently requires pointing you somewhere, even if it's not linkified for everyone. Was brought up again a few times in bug 537105.