RFC: BlogSpamAssassin, proposal

[Henry Stern <he...@stern.ca>]

Hello everyone,

I hope that you have all had safe and enjoyable holidays.  My apologies
for starting this discussion so close to Christmas.  In all honesty, I
had forgotten that Christmas was coming.

To start things off, I propose that we create a sub-project of
SpamAssassin consisting of mailing lists, separate wiki space and a svn
repository.

Here are the goals that I have for this project:

1. Perform an in-depth analysis of blog spam motivation and methods.
Cost/benefit analysis will be the focus of this document.

2. Categorise and analyse the current and possible anti blog-spam
approaches.  For each approach, the analysis will include a summary of
how the approach deals with the cause and symptoms of the blog spam
problem, how it affects the end users (blogger, reader), maintenance
required by developers and bloggers, how the approach may be improved
and a list of projects implementing each approach.  The unique strengths
and weaknesses of the individual projects should also be covered.

3. Using the knowledge that we have gathered in (1) and (2), select
approaches for further study and improvement.  Using volunteers from the
weblogging community, run usability studies over the course of two or
three months.  Compare the effectiveness of the approaches against a
control group.

4. Using what we have learned from (3), identify how weblog user
interfaces need to be improved to cope with the symptoms of the blog
spam problem and to best accomodate the approaches that we have
determined to be the best.  Author a "best practice" document detailing
how blog spam should be dealt with.

5. Develop an Apache-licensed reference implementation of our solutions
along the lines of spamd (re-using code where appropriaate), client-side
code and patches/plugins for blog software with the intent that our
solutions will be incorporated into the release versions of major blog
software.

SpamAssassin and the ASF's role in this project will to provide a
neutral venue for this project and to contribute with expertise in the
field of anti-spam.  As it has been previousoly mentioned, some of the
SpamAssassin developers (myself included) are also bloggers and have
first-hand experience with the problem of blog spam.

Should the SpamAssassin PMC approve this proposal, I'd like to get the
mailing lists and wiki space created as soon as possible.

All the best in the new year.

Henry