[aur-general] Fighting spam on the AUR

[oliver]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:44:26AM +0000, Xyne wrote:
[...]
> How hard would it be to create an action queue for comments and flagging?
> 
> The idea would be to add a new field to the user accounts table (e.g. a boolean
> named "supervise"). The default value would be true for new accounts. The value
> could be changed by TUs and/or automatically changed after a fixed interval
> and/or certain actions (depending on how far you want to go with the logic).
> 
> When flagged, comments and actions would be submitted to a queue that would be
> accessible to TUs via a webpage with accept/reject buttons for each action.
> 
> This avoids the annoyance and data collection of captchas and it also avoids
> the risk of blacklisting legitimate users who share IP ranges (or some proxy)
> with trolls. Bonus: AUR automation tools will not be broken.
> 
> It will introduce a variable delay before actions are executed but in most
> cases this will probably not be more than a couple of hours given the current
> number of TUs.
[...]

Delays in actions are worse than Captchas.

If I do something, I want immediate feedback.
Otherwise I assume the system is not working and I would try again...
...maybe 3 or 5 or 10 times until I think "AUR is shit!", "Fuck Arch".

Even Captchas allow immediate feedback, even they insist me to
have detour instead of a straight way.
But at least I know whats going on.

Waiting - especially if there is an unknown delay time -
is the whorst case.

Ciao,
   Oliver