Change private message wait timeout?

fergalr

Hi there,

The private message facility enforces only 1 message every 60 seconds.
I presume this is to prevent spammers sending many messages, rather than some sort of backend synch issue.

I suggest making this threshold less aggressive.
There's been times where I've had two or 3 messages to respond to, and I just need to send a quick reply, maybe a 'great, meet you there' in response to an advert meeting request - having to wait for the timeout after each message can get annoying.

In preventing spam, I'm sure something like a 5 second timeout would be equally effective, and not get in the users way. Or even a 5 second timeout for the first 3 or 4 messages within a time period, increasing to 60 seconds thereafter.

A minor fix, but maybe a simple one?

Conor

A lot of successful spammers on boards are not bots, they're manual labour. Slowing them down is actually very valuable, since it minimizes the damage caused before they get blocked.

Further down the road, when we're next working on flood checking, I might have a look at allowing short bursts in excess of the flood limit, i.e. allowing 3 in a 3 minute period rather than enforcing a strict 60 second interval.

fergalr

Conor wrote: »

A lot of successful spammers on boards are not bots, they're manual labour. Slowing them down is actually very valuable, since it minimizes the damage caused before they get blocked.

Further down the road, when we're next working on flood checking, I might have a look at allowing short bursts in excess of the flood limit, i.e. allowing 3 in a 3 minute period rather than enforcing a strict 60 second interval.

Fair enough; I understand there's a return-vs-time balance here.

If the issue is manual spam:

if ( (user.postcount || user.ads) > X && user.accountAge > Y) {
interval = 1
}
else
{
interval = 60
}

(Assuming that the user details are cached in ram already and so its cheap to do - but actually having no idea how this stuff is stored in the boards.ie system)



Really, if spam is a ongoing problem, whats ideally needed is a dynamic on-the-fly statistical learning system that takes in a bag of user features (time on site, post count, previous post content, current post content, PM content, history, private messages recieved, ads posted, posts replied to) and is trained on past moderator actions (bans, deletes) - and then generates a quick spam-likelihood score, which is then used to dynamically configure their threshold between max_value and min_value.

I think a very simple off-the-shelf-tools approach would sort all this out with very high accuracy. It'd be a nice feature for online forums in general if someone were to make it and package it. Basically, an 'online forum spamassassin'.

Any time you've nothing else to do...

Conor

fergalr wrote: »

Fair enough; I understand there's a return-vs-time balance here.

If the issue is manual spam:

if ( (user.postcount || user.ads) > X && user.accountAge > Y) {
interval = 1
}
else
{
interval = 60
}

(Assuming that the user details are cached in ram already and so its cheap to do - but actually having no idea how this stuff is stored in the boards.ie system)

It's not that easy.

fergalr wrote: »

Really, if spam is a ongoing problem, whats ideally needed is a dynamic on-the-fly statistical learning system that takes in a bag of user features (time on site, post count, previous post content, current post content, PM content, history, private messages recieved, ads posted, posts replied to) and is trained on past moderator actions (bans, deletes) - and then generates a quick spam-likelihood score, which is then used to dynamically configure their threshold between max_value and min_value.

I think a very simple off-the-shelf-tools approach would sort all this out with very high accuracy. It'd be a nice feature for online forums in general if someone were to make it and package it. Basically, an 'online forum spamassassin'.

Any time you've nothing else to do...