[Spam Fight] Disable hyperlinks in the comment body field

Created on 3 May 2022, about 2 years ago
Updated 3 June 2023, about 1 year ago

Problem/Motivation

Most of us are aware of how bad is the situation with constant spamming on localize.drupal.org. As these thousands of unwanted comments are posted by sleeping agent user accounts, the third-party PerimeterX service DA contracted has no or minimal effect against them.

Therefore sometimes (every 3–4 months on average) I get stressed by the situation enough to spend some time and clean them up manually. (As I have the privilege to access the /admin/content/comment listing page.)

However, it's a Sisyphean job as spammers probably utilize some sort of automated tools to post.

Steps to reproduce

Go to the page 60 or 61 of the list when spams were cleaned up last time. 50 comments per page × 60 page = cca. 3000 spam messages.

Proposed resolution

A suggestion assumingly relatively easy to implement: disable hyperlinks in the comment body field. Formatted rich texts without external hyperlinks pointing to spammers' domains would minimize the SEO benefit of spam posts, which hopefully results in decreasing their amount as well in the future.

Remaining tasks

Discuss, decide, implement.

User interface changes

Newly posted comments would not contain hyperlinks.

API changes

n/a

Data model changes

n/a

✨ Feature request
Status

Closed: outdated

Version

1.0

Component

User interface

Created by

🇭🇺Hungary Balu Ertl Budapest 🇪🇺

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It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.

  • 🇭🇺Hungary Pandelon

    Szerintem ez simán mehet, meg lehet oldani e nélkül is a commentet, ha kell akkor van más csatorna a link megosztására. Viszont a spamet szűri a módszer . Egyetértek a beveztéssel.

  • 🇮🇹Italy apaderno Brescia, 🇮🇹

    On api.drupal.org, where similar spam comments were posted, comments can now be posted only from user accounts that have been confirmed on drupal.org. That alone would stop spammers, which do not post on drupal.org and would not get their accounts confirmed.

  • 🇮🇹Italy apaderno Brescia, 🇮🇹

    Disabling links in the comment body field should be done only for new accounts. Accounts used to participate on the site should not have links disabled.
    On drupal.org, many limitations are removed when the confirmed role is assigned and more permissions are given to the accounts with the community role. Those roles are used also for accounts on localize.drupal.org and they are synchronized with the roles given to the same account on drupal.org; they can be used to restrict the activity on localize.drupal.org.

    (There should not be a permission that allows to post links on localize.drupal.org. Avoiding that some user accounts are used to post links would require some custom code.)

  • Status changed to Closed: outdated about 1 year ago
  • 🇳🇴Norway gisle Norway

    I think this proposal is awkward to implement and also no longer necessary, because 📌 [Spam fight] Allow only confirmed accounts to post comments Fixed has been deployed and achieves the same end with simpler means. Closing. Feel free to reopen if you disagree.

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