Ask Slashdot: Using a Sandbox To Deal With Spambots?

shellster_dude writes "Slashdot is certainly no stranger to the problem of spam bots. While blocking a spam bot may seem like the best solution, it is likely that the spammer will simply re-register with a different name. While trying to solve this dilemma on my own forums, I had an epiphany. What if, instead of blocking a spam bot, I could mark a spammer, and then hide all their comments from everyone else? The spammer could continue to go their merry way, spamming to their heart's content. When they visit the forum, they see their spam comments correctly placed in the threads, but their comments would only be visible to them. Thus, an effective sandbox which would prevent them from registering a new user once they had been 'blocked.' Are any other Slashdotters familiar with this technique? Does any software currently use this technique?"

Comments

I will sell you this solution already debugged!

[HornWumpus]

Why is nobody responding?

Re:I will sell you this solution already debugged!

[MightyYar]

Because it will be trivial for a spammer to check his posts from another account?

Re:I will sell you this solution already debugged!

[nmb3000]

Because it will be trivial for a spammer to check his posts from another account?

I remember reading an article on Joel on Software some time ago that talks about this kind of approach. The difference was that instead of only showing those posts to the spammer/troll's account, they were also shown to that poster's /8 or /16 subnet (or something like that). This goes far in solving the problem for multiple accounts (but still fails for proxy servers).

The downside is that the troll's "local Internet" sees the spam/troll, but the greater Internet doesn't. It always seemed like a good tradeoff to me.

Wish I could find the article now, but not having any luck.

Re:I will sell you this solution already debugged!

[Frnknstn]

This technique is widely used against trolls on various Internet forums. It is often called 'Hellbanning'

Re:I will sell you this solution already debugged!

[Ziggitz]

Congratulations are the most inappropriate use of lmgtfy ever. It was neither an easily derivable search term the article poster could have used themselves without prior knowledge nor was it in fact, the use case that the poster was talking about.

Re:I will sell you this solution already debugged!

[socceroos]

Interesting. However, I don't think you'd be attracting many new users when they see 90% spam on your forums.

Re:I will sell you this solution already debugged!

[Joce640k]

Easy solution. Make it so that spammers can see posts by everyone, including other spammers. That way spammers will think they are being successful, especially if you do an IP block on them.

Until the 2nd, 3rd, 4th account is identified and marked as a spam account, it won't be able to see the posts of the 1st account.

I think you overestimate spammers. 99.9999999% of them aren't people, they're bots. I doubt they're even checking from other accounts.

Old Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Old idea that doesn't fix much because spammers change accounts after 1-20 posts anyway.

Re:Old Idea

[cpu6502]

I wouldn't say it "doesn't work." I experienced this shadow banning after I mentioned I not only own a Hybrid electric car, but also a diesel car that gets similar mileage (49MPG). Well the environmentalists furiously attacked me for daring to use the word "diesel" in their forum, and the group owner (also anti-diesel) made my posts invisible.

It took me a few weeks to realize that none of my posts were being responded too. Rather than waste time with another account, I just left the place. So the shadow-ban worked.

hellbanning.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning

Reddit

[cornface]

Reddit does something like this.

Shadow Ban

[TubeSteak]

The practice goes by several other names I can't recall, but I know it as a "shadow ban"
Basically, you tick a box and nobody but that poster can see their nonsense.

Some forum software already includes the feature, others require a plugin or a roll-your-own solution.

Re:Shadow Ban

[History's Coming To]

Yup, also known as "miserable users" on some forum software.

Hey, wacky idea, why not assign a "degree of spamminess" rating and let people decide on their own level of viewing? You could even do it for funny posts, informative posts, troll posts etc. Mind you, it could get out of hand and overly complicated.

Re:Shadow Ban

[Compaqt]

Drupal has a module to do this to put trolls in their own "cave"

http://drupal.org/project/cave

Reddit Does

[Stickybombs]

Steve Huffman, one of the creators of Reddit, talks about this exact solution during his Udacity class, Web Application Engineering. http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253/CourseRev/apr2012 I think it was during week 4 "Whom to Trust," but I don't have links to the exact video. So in short, yes, it has been done effectively in the past, though I believe they wrote their own code to do it.

Two Bots

[TheNinjaroach]

Seems like it would be easy enough to work around with a second bot that checks to make sure spam is getting through.

No.

[ledow]

What makes you think that they will stop just because their account doesn't get closed?

They will not notice the efficacy of their spam, they will just keep signing up and spamming. And you'll play whack-a-mole trying to put all their accounts into sandboxes.

Just how often does a spammer go back to see if his comment posted or not, or if his email got through? Rarely. Spam works on the basis of mass volume. Put a billion adverts on a billion websites and your sales will increase somehow. And the price of those adverts is next to zero after the first few thousand.

It won't work, but it will make a lot of hassle for you, from storage to filtering to just plain bandwidth if you have a thousand spammers realising they can auto-sign-up and spam you endlessly.

It's like running a "honeypot". You'll gather lots of data at great expense and resources. But you won't stop the spam.

The Secret Garden

[george14215]

What's even funnier is to allow all the people marked as "spammers" to see each other's comments as well. We called this the Secret Garden.

nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Yes, it has been done

[Minwee]

There's a site called Slashdot which allows comments to be rated from 0 to 5. Spam, trolls, and posts like this one will be moderated down to zero and blocked from view by most other users.

Check it out some time.

Make sure Google etc can't see it.

[billstewart]

The really important thing is to make sure Google (and the other search engines and ad services, if you care about them) can't see the spam. That's the real objective of the spammers, and those that bother checking may find that spamming you is less effective in fixing their page ranks.