#1 2024-03-08 8:45 pm

DB_Paul

Member

Registered: 2024-03-08

Posts: 1

Khoros?

Will Stopforumspam work with Khoros?

What benefits does it offer than akismet does not?

Have you explored an AI solution to spam/moderation?

Thank you!

Paul

pedigree

uıɐbɐ ʎɐqǝ ɯoɹɟ pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ɐ buıʎnq ɹǝʌǝu ɯ,ı

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2008-04-16

Posts: 7,056

Re: Khoros?

It will work with Khoros if Khoros has the ability to call our API at a predetermined stage in the data flow, hopefully before content is pushed live to your website.  Failing that, you can always either manually review new users/content or use a webserver hook (nginx or even a layer7 scripted proxy) to determine the trustworthiness of the incoming user.  I'm not familiar with the architecture of Khoros so couldnt say for certain

Akismet works more on the content of a message (and they charge, we don't).  StopForumSpam works on email and IP data. 

Whilst a copy/paste message to 100,000 sites will be picked up by Akismet, its not necessary the case if its 100 different posts all AI generated to look different.  If you block a spammer by IP then not amount of AI generated targeted posts can get on your forum.  I fear Akismet is going to struggle with the availability of cheaper and cheaper models that quickly outperform GPT4

We provide the data, how people use that is up to them.  They can install a plugin that someone has written and they, and only they have the ability to tune that how that wish.  If we flagged a post as spam and its not then that's our fault and that would require a lot of revisiting.   Some people want a zero tolerance approach to spam and others are happy to use a StopForumSpam data point as a metric in evaluating a range of measures before an automated decision is made.

The issue with running AI over the API data that we provide is that usernames are 100% randomly generated leaving a 0% trust score for anything there.  Email addresses are about the same, they can be 100% random given the huge supply of cheap (1st year almost free) domains that turn them into disposable domains for 99 cents.  IP address, now they're a lot harder to get in comparison but still incredibly easy to do so.  Buy a VPN, away you go.  Having pushed a model into something affordable, such as the ML plugin for Redis, there is almost zero correlation between IP, username, and email. 

But the real pressing issue there is $$$.  StopForumSpam runs on an annual budget of $0.  It gets about $200 a year in donations, give or take but that certainly doesn't cover costs.   Investing in any sort of near-realtime AI engine to build anything is well beyond the scope of what can be afford.  Sure it would be nice but I dont see Microsoft or Google stepping up to over any sort of AI offering that is either fast enough or free enough.

Having seen your email address (which I certainly won't disclose), I can see what your company does.... And it does it very well.  We have (at the paying job) dozens of your clusters but that is "big boy" data, and with it, the costs.

I'm happy to talk more if you have any implementable ideas