Hey everyone, so you might have seen some Korean spam lately from a certain place, this has been assaulting a flurry of Discourse forums lately. Not to worry, I’m on it, and so I just installed the discourse-akismet plugin as we speak.
In the interests of transparency, Akismet works by looking at stuff posted on our forum and then comparing it to a database of known spam activity.
You can read more here:
For instance, this data is sent:
Field Name | Discourse Value
------------- | -------------
Author | User's Name
Author Email | User's verified email (can be disabled with the `akismet_transmit_email` site setting)
Comment Type | "forum-post"
Content | Post's raw column
Permalink | Link to topic
User IP | IP address of request
User Agent | User agent of request
Referrer | HTTP referer of request
NOTE: I’ve disabled the sending of user emails for now.
I want to expose as little information as possible, and hopefully that’s good enough to avoid drowning in spam. Now, installing Akismet like this would require an amendment of our privacy policy since technically this means I’m “sharing” user data with a third party. Other than the email, all the metrics sent look like stuff that is already publicly exposed anyway.
Please let me know if anyone has a problem with this – it seems a worthy tradeoff in the battle against spam, but ultimately I want to do right by the community.