The problem & context

• There are many so-called “profile spammers” in all instances of Decidim. They create a profile, fill in the personal URL and bio, and then do nothing on the website, or sometimes post some content.

Proposed solutions:

Better detect of suspicious users & automatic report to Discourage “spam users”

1. The first time a user posts a link on their profile or elsewhere (comments, etc.) automatically report this user (with the new type “Suspected Spam User”) and show them a warning like “We’ll check your content for spam, until then, your link will be hidden”.
2. Strip links from profile and other places, until the profile solves its automatic report for the first time.The criteria will be something like: registered users the last 60 days and filled out a link in the profile bio or in the comments for the first time. Users with a cancelled report will not be automatically reported again.

How do we propose to implement this?

• It’s better to implement it in core, because it’s a general problem.
• But many instances of Decidim need to fix this issue in a short time, and we also appreciate the possibility of implementing it as a module if it is not feasible to implement this improvement quickly in the core. What do you think about it?

Funded by:

• Some clients can collectively fund this improvement.

📌 Related issues recently “resolved”:

Some improvements already implemented on dev:

• 3.2) Add no follow to profile urls gid://metadecidim/Decidim::Hashtag/418/8779
• 3.3) Add noreferrer and ugc to profile urls gid://metadecidim/Decidim::Hashtag/419/9047

📌 Related discussions:

• Related to Fighting Spam aka The Clone Wars gid://metadecidim/Decidim::Hashtag/420/8239

📌 Other related issues in Meta:

• Direct Block button on FrontEnd (New feature in Meta)
• Bots registrations (Bug in Meta)
• Detect the use of spam-bots and ban non compliant users (Bug in Meta)
• Use content classification systems for better SPAM detection (New feature in Meta)
• An accesible captcha (New feature in Meta)