How to deal with spam

These are some simple ways to deal with spam on a StatusNet site.


 * 1) Keep your site private. If you're only using the software for private social networking (say, in a company), set the site to 'private' so it's invisible to people outside.
 * 2) Turn off or limit registration. If your site is for public social networking by a group or an individual, there's no reason to allow random people to register. You can set 'inviteonly' mode to only allow people to register who were invited by another member. You can set 'closed' mode to disable all new registrations.
 * 3) Silence spammers. If you've got users on a site who are spamming, you can use the 'moderate' button on their profile page to 'silence' them (prevent them from posting). You can also 'delete' the user account from the same page.
 * 4) Add a Captcha. To slow down automated registrations, use the Recaptcha plugin.
 * 5) Throttle registrations. The RegisterThrottle plugin will disallow registering multiple accounts from the same IP address.
 * 6) Throttle subscriptions. Spammers like subscribing to lots of other users. Use the SubscriptionThrottle plugin to limit the number of subscriptions allowed per day.
 * 7) Disallow words and domains. You can block certain words and domains using the Blacklist plugin.
 * 8) Use a content filter. You can use the BlogspamNet or Mollom plugins to filter content that's posted.

Note that there's no magic bullet here; if you're running a public community site with open registration, you're going to get spammers registering. As with any other Web software, you need to schedule an amount of time to manage spam.