[lisppaste-devel] Lisppaste maintenance and administration

[Alastair Bridgewater]

[I attempted to send this last night, but forgot that I wasn't
subscribed to the list from this address. Problem fixed, so the
message is being re-sent.]

Hello all,

As was discussed recently on #lisp (ccl channel log for 2010-05-29,
starting at 19:59:55), lisppaste is presently running in a rather
diminished capacity, largely due to abuse by people attempting to spam
freenode. This abuse requires maintainer/administrator attention to
deal with, which is in short supply.

Actions already taken on this front are, per Brian Mastenbrook, as follows:

> <chandler> The XML-RPC interface has been disabled until I feel that it won't be abused.
> <chandler> The set of content regexps has been beefed up, and a user-agent blacklist added for the robot that was pasting before.
> <chandler> When a banned content/title/user-agent is triggered, the IP that triggered it is immediately banned.
> <chandler> If a single IP submits more than N pastes in M seconds, that IP is immediately banned.
> <chandler> I've removed the bot from most channels and will add it back as people ask for it. For many channels, the spam pastes were the first pastes in a year or more.
> <chandler> Oh, and it now randomizes captchas (sorry, Krystof).

Brian also announced an intent to kill the system should there be
further problems with spam, and hope that someone else would volunteer
to take over.  Subsequently, Erik Huelsmann expressed an interest in
helping with the maintenance, and both Brian and myself stated that we
wouldn't mind doing some of the maintenance/development work, provided
that someone else handled the day-to-day administration and dealing
with spam attacks. Brian also expressed a willingness to answer
questions and provide advice on how to proceed.

Some development ideas were batted about, including an additional
angle on spam filtering, which I'm sure will be revisited soon, along
with the start of a discussion of development philosophy.  We also
agreed that lisppaste-devel was the appropriate place to hold further
discussion. I will be preparing a separate email tomorrow covering
some of the suggestions made during the discussion, as well as the
issue of paste storage improvements.

Wrapping up, I had two unanswered questions for Brian,

1. What do we need to know about administrating the system?
2. How can the administration be made better/easier?

Any questions, comments, corrections?

Thank you,

--Alastair Bridgewater