Sitewide antispam capability: comment CAPTCHAs for inactive accounts

[azurelunatic]

Title:
Sitewide antispam capability: comment CAPTCHAs for inactive accounts

Area:
comments, anonymous users, inactive users, antispam

Summary:
When an account becomes inactive (discussion of what constitutes "inactive" for the purposes of this concept to follow), require any anonymous comments to fill out a CAPTCHA. If/when the account becomes active again, revert to the user's settings. This would not delete anything already in the journal, would not stop logged-in users from commenting, and would allow anonymous users who could solve the CAPTCHA to comment.

Description:
Spun off the comments on http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/1374810.html --

Spam comments are a woe that should be discouraged, while not discouraging comments of legitimate discourse from real sentient beings.

Most comment spam on Dreamwidth is anonymous. One of the places that spammers strike is the accounts of people who have become inactive. If someone's not around for any particular reason, they generally can't get rid of any spam that shows up in their journal. Emboldened by the way their first overtures have not been repelled or cleaned up, the spammer strikes again, and again, and again.

Anonymous spam is present until cleaned up by the journal owner (or someone logged in as them). Registered user/OpenID spam is only present until someone (someone else hit by the spammer, or a good neighbor) reports the spammer and the spammer is suspended; all of the spam comments left by that user will then go away across the site.

For this reason, it is more important to attempt to repel anonymous spam in the event that the journal owner is not around and therefore not able to take action.

When the journal owner becomes inactive, and the journal allows anonymous comments, and the journal owner does not already present anonymous comments with a CAPTCHA, and anonymous comments are not screened by default (screening leaves the anonymous comments invisible to search engines unless the journal owner comes through and unscreens them, and by that time first the owner is active, and second, the owner is hardly going to unscreen spam on purpose unless there's a bigger problem) then there should be a sitewide setting to put up a CAPTCHA upon the attempted anonymous comments to those journals.

Now the definition of "inactive" for the purposes of probably not actively gardening journal comments. This should be something that can be adjusted on the administrative end of things should it not be got right on the first try. As a first attempt:

No new or edited entries in personal journal
No new or edited community entries? (Can we track this?)
No new or edited comments (from the journal, not to the journal, either in their own journal or abroad) (can we track this?)
No active login sessions

... for at least 60 days? Doing anything that touches one of the above things would start the clock over again. If someone logs in, leaves a comment in a community, deletes the comment, and logs out, that would restart the clock. If someone leaves themselves logged in after doing that, they would have until that login automatically expires before the clock starts.

Poll #11570 Sitewide antispam capability: comment CAPTCHAs for inactive accounts

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 54

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
39 (72.2%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
8 (14.8%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
7 (13.0%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[daweaver]

My preference is always to respond to the suggestion as it is presented. It wasn't at all obvious that Azure Lunatic was anything other than an interested observer.

Thank you also for clarifying the change in captcha format. I very much doubt that data exists to show how many (or few) humans are deterred from interacting by this form of test, or how many humans are deterred by the presence of any test.