RFC: Future of lisppaste

[Erik Huelsmann]

Hi,

In the early days of web popularity, a very nice irc-bot+paste engine was
developed, allowing discussion on IRC to be very nicely combined with paste
sharing to help the discussion. It was written in lisp and given the nice
name of "lisppaste".

While the idea was great to start out, in its grand days, the bot even
joined over 60 channels(!), it has gradually seen increases in abuse;
initially "just" to spam IRC channels (which caused the bot to be removed
from all channels, loosing most of its usefulness), later with lots of
inappropriate content being posted.

Various measures were taken over time to reduce the attractiveness of
posting to lisppaste:
 * disabling of the XML-RPC api (which integrated with emacs!)
 * removal from the IRC channels
 * addition of a captcha
up to most recently even:
 * removal of the listing of posts

While the last measure was hoped to take care of the last incentive to post
to lisppaste, it seems that links to the inappropriate content are posted
elsewhere -- eliminating the need to list the pastes.


With the majority of pastes being irrelevant to lisppaste's purpose
(supporting programmers discussing their code in IRC or other channels),
because they're inappropriate content of some kind or another, my question
to you all is:

What should we do with lisppaste? Should we simply remove it from the web?
Should we put it in read-only mode* (so as to maintain the archive of
relevant pastes)? Or are there other options? E.g. someone who wants to
adopt lisppaste and invest the time and energy to implement measures to
fight the spam and implement measures to discourage or disable posting of
inappropriate content?




* If we put it in read-only mode, it's my opinion that the existing
inappropriate content should still be cleaned. Any contributions to that
effect would still be greatly appreciated.


-- 
Bye,

Erik.

http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.
Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.
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