Preventing Spam

Calagator has a few different things aimed at preventing spam events. Initially, we'd assumed that things like user accounts and captchas might be necessary to prevent spam from being added, but we've been happily proven wrong.

Blacklist

A simple blacklist file at /config/blacklist.txt stores a list of regular expressions . Any event with text that matches one of these expressions is blocked. As such, it's important to write these expressions specifically enough to avoid matching legitimate content.

Trap Fields

To trap bots that add spam by filling in any forms they can find, we have a trap field on the new event and venue forms. If any text is entered in this field, which is hidden from users by CSS, the event will be rejected with an error accusing the submitter of being an evil robot.

Three Link Limit

Event descriptions containing more than three links are rejected.

Active Gardening

Some spam still invariably gets through the two automated methods above. This is dealt with by a small army of community members following the recent changes feed via RSS or on the web. When a new pattern is noticed among the incoming spam, it should be added to the blacklist. More random, or handcrafted spam messages, should be manually deleted. INITIAL REVIEW NEEDED