[Python-Dev] comments vs spam in PyPI [was: eggs now mandatory for pypi?] (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Oct 6 06:43:55 CEST 2009


Antoine Pitrou writes:

Guido van Rossum <guido python.org> writes:

There are plenty of things we can learn about fighting spam and other forms of vandalism from other areas of the social web, including our very own wiki, and other wikis (WikiPedia survives despite spam).

Doesn't Wikipedia have a lot of human eyes watching, however?

Yes. In fact Wikipedia's real issue is not spam, but edit wars. It just happens that the same people who are willing to watch to make sure that nobody "corrects" the facts consider spam damage, too, and they get rid of it as part of their mission.

What this means is that the most active parts of the Wikipedia are also quickly policed. What's left is much less attractive for spammers, and there are a number of volunteers willing to respond fairly promptly to reports of spam in articles that nobody currently considers "theirs".

I think it could probably be adapted to Python community scale, but it would probably require new mechanisms (spam reporting and possibly cleaning -- in Wikipedia you hit the revert button, choose a known good version, and you're done) in PyPI, and recruitment of volunteers to take care of spam to products currently not "owned".

IMO it would be better to design developer-specific mechanisms rather than a generic commenting vehicle, cf. Fred Drake's thinking.



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