On Monday, November 6, 2006, 10:39:06 PM, Michael Renzmann wrote:
I'm about to write a spam filter plugin for Trac [1] which makes use of SURBLs. While Trac is no guestbook, trac-driven sites are hit by spam posts which have, following to your comment, more in common with guestbook spam than with email spam.
That makes me wonder: a.) Is there a SURBL (outside of surbl.org) available already specially for website spam?
b.) If not, would it be worthwile to extend the focus of surbl.org to website spam?
Sure, once there's no more mail spam. ;-)
(BTW spam is about 91% of all mail now: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2051949,00.asp .)
The mentioned plugin will be one of several that users can enable. Each plugin will modify the karma of a post (Wiki edit, new trouble ticket, comment to existing trouble ticket, ...), and only if the karma is above a user-defined threshold it will be accepted.
As the old version of Trac we use currently on madwifi.org does not provide native support for spam filtering, I installed another solution [2] based on mod_security to block spams. In order to adjust the filters if needs be, I logged (and still log) all spam postings that hit our site during the last 4 months (~38000 posts total). Is that interesting for feeding the database of a specialized website spam SURBL?
Bye, Mike
[1] http://trac.edgewall.org [2] http://madwifi.org/wiki/FightingTracSpam
In principle it may be useful, but we want SURBLs to stay focussed on mail spam.
May I suggest that you try checking web spams with SURBLs and see what the hit rate is like. If the hit rate is significantly less than for mail spam, then it may not be worth using our data (and generating the DNS queries) for the website checking application.
For any application using our data, please be sure to follow all of the Implementation Guidelines, especially local whitelisting (exclusion lists) and caching.
http://www.surbl.org/implementation.html
Please be mindful of our DNS, etc., resources, which are all donated.
Cheers,
Jeff C. -- Don't harm innocent bystanders.