Propose new functionalities for Decidim software
#DecidimRoadmap Designing Decidim together
Detect the use of spam-bots and ban non compliant users
**Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.**
Fight against disinformation, spamming and trolls. At the moment, if the administrators do not set a proposals limit per user, it is easy for a malevolent user to create one account and use a tool like Selenium to publish hundreds of contributions. Furthermore, administrators are not able to ban users.
**Describe the solution you'd like**
Implement a way to report users
Like we have a way to flag a contribution for moderation, a similar mechanism can be implemented to flag users and give moderators the ability to block said user. Everyone can participate in this reporting (admin, moderators, users) and flag users based on their harmful behaviour towards the debate or the content they posted on they public profile (avatar, biography, personal website).
- Add a flag to report users on their public profile;
- In the admin, add a column to the participant table that displays the number of time a user was reported and make a sortable column so the admin can see first the ones with most reports and take action (block) if needed;
- Send notification to moderator and admin when a user is reported.
Allow administrators to ban non compliant users
Administrators should be able to ban users, for example when someone repeatedly attack the debate. This ban should be transparent.
Add a “ban” action button in the Participants panel.
- Admin can unban user
- Users will be banned at the Decidim Identities level meaning they cannot access the website with another provider through the EU login. (Ex : I connect with Twitter, got banned I cannot connect using Facebook if it has the same email or is associated to my EU login id)
When a user is banned :
- an attribute (ex: blocked) is added to their profile which makes it impossible for them to login
- its avatar is replaced by the default one
- its pseudo is replaced by “Banned user”
- Profile page is rendered inaccessible by non-admin users (to facilitate moderation based on their contribution history)
- All contribution remain visible
Automate the ban of spamming users
In order to detect those users, we need to define behaviours we want to prevent. For example, we can consider that more than ten messages published in less than one minute from the account justifies that the system automatically blocks the user.
- An asynchronous job could check the database every minute, searching for such behaviour and report or block user.
- The detailed list of behaviours in question should be made public and the code open sourced.
**Describe alternatives you've considered**
Above measure are up to selection / discussion.
**Additional context**
We've seen these behaviour happen in our latest experiences when we scaled it to a couple dozens of thousand users : automated user creation, automated content creation, coordinated mass posting.
**Does this issue could impact on users private data?**
No
**Funded by**
EU Commission
This proposal has been accepted and is under development
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Conversation with Virgile Deville
Hello @RoxanaOprescu
I think the community is interested in the user_quota system you describe.
We should make it easy to enable / disable in the admin because it might not be useful to all instances.
Could you provide more details on your implementation so we can discuss it ? @carol and @andres are also interested
Our quota system works like this:
○ Allow 3 posts per day for citizens that have no post in the last 6 months
○ Allow 10 posts per day for citizens that have at least three posts for more than
one day and less than six months old
○ Allow 25 posts per day for citizens that have more than 20 posts in the last six
months and older than 24 hours
○ Allow any moderator / admin up to 100 posts per day
○ Inform any user that exceeds the quota that they did so and ask them to come
back in 24 hours (this will be as an warning message)
Those values are configurable from admin's dashboard (Settings section)
https://www.linkpicture.com/q/Screenshot-from-2020-11-26-09-47-10.png
So the logic behind it is the more active you are the more post you get to make right ?
Could you tell me what you put behind the word post ?
I'm assuming : proposals, meetings, debates, comments
Is the amount of post a total of these four ?
What do you think about my proposal of implementing a checkbox to enable, disable the quota system ?
@virgile_deville Yes, the main idea is to encourage users to be more active and to have less content reported (because all the content that has been reported is not included into the calculation of the new quota value). So it's important to be active, but at the same time to have unreported content in order to be able to post more on the website.
"Post" = add content (comments and meetings) on the website. For each user we take into account all the comments published (and not reported) and all the meetings created (and not reported).
About your proposal with the checkbox, we cannot give you an answer right now because we need confirmation from our client. But in order to obtain a similar behavior, quota's values can be updated to a large value (e.3000) from admin's settings.
> But in order to obtain a similar behavior, quota's values can be updated to a large value (e.3000) from admin's settings.
Right that's a good way to disable it.
I think it's weird that "Post" doesn't include at least proposals (which is gonna be used by the EU for COFE).
Best would be that Post = proposals, meetings, debates, comments
so that the feature cover whole the UGC possibilities in Decidim
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