On Fri, 15 May 2020 at 08:34, Patrick Uiterwijk <puiterwijk(a)redhat.com>
wrote:
On Fri, May 15, 2020 at 1:58 PM Stephen John Smoogen
<smooge(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>
> Currently I am dealing with 1-3 failed account creations a day due to
our spam checking tool, basset.
>
> Basset is the tool which sits in the account system creation path and
tries to check to see if an account is semi-valid or not. This was written
by Patrick Uiterwijk about 4 to 5 years ago to deal with a large increase
of spam accounts from a group who were paying people to get past other spam
tools versus using scripts. We came up with various heuristics and tools to
make for a general 'oh you are using a one-time-email system.. no account
for you' and other checks.
>
> However it is almost a full time job to keep up with all the various
spam groups methods for creating fake accounts for whatever they want. I
haven't put much time into since 2018 and the heuristics that basset is
using to judge whether a person has a valid account or not are way out of
date. The spam groups have also gotten more sophisticated in creating
accounts so we are more likely to allow a spammer in than a 'ham'-mer.
>
> I am not sure what to do.. I do not know how hard it would be to pull
basset out of the system and I do not have the time to update/fix/improve
Patrick's code on this. So I figured it would be good to get some feedback
on this.
Disabling it is very simple.
Just remove all the config lines at
https://infrastructure.fedoraproject.org/cgit/ansible.git/tree/roles/fas_...
.
An alternative could be to just increase the required spam-score from
Basset to *very* high numbers (in the thousands), so it never sees
someone as spam.
That last one would mean it also doesn't need changes in the other
apps that might be integrated with it, and it would still get all the
useful info.
That is probably the better plan. The tool has been very useful.. it is
just needing someone to do the tuning work or to expand it to do that
learning itself. I do not have that time, and I would prefer that people
knew that versus expecting to improve by itself.
--
Stephen J Smoogen.