Easy & Effective Spammer Reporting On Identi.ca

Spammers are like vermin who find their way up every trouser leg they can find. Anywhere there is cheap or free "many to many" medium they will sniff out every trouser leg within 100 miles. It's important therefore to tuck your digital trouser legs into your digital socks and develop a digital twitch that stomps on them when they appear.

How attractive a service or site is to a spammer depends on a lot of things:

• How automated the code is in thwarting them
• How hard it is to get around those automated defences
• How many eyeballs they can hit before triggering an account deletion
• How many links they can get back to their site to boost up the search engine rankings before they're deleted
• How many accounts they can run at once before being thwarted
• How easy it is for users of that service to report them
• How many moderators are currently active at any given time
• How quickly their account is deleted

If a service is closed, run by staff who don't really care about anything other than user numbers it will attract spammers like the super wealthy to a tax loophole. If a service is open, and treated as a community then people will play their part to help out if and when they can. Identi.ca (Status.net) is one such service. It's a microblogging service like Twitter, only open source.

Like Twitter you can read and post Dents in a number of different ways, there are desktop clients for every OS, some are multi protocol clients so they do more than just Identi.ca (Status.net). I use Pino on Linux. Pino is also a Twitter client although the recent 0auth change at Twitter.com has rendered Pino's Twitter functionality useless until an update arrives.

As a client to read, write and reply to Dents, Pino is excellent. You can look at conversations in context, you can look at a users timeline and profile, what it does not show is the user ID number.

That user ID number is very handy in reporting a spammer, which means you have to open a browser, go find the user profile, copy and paste the user ID back into Pino. It's not exactly convenient.

The user ID is not essential but remember that we're trying to play our part, by making the moderators role as easy as possible. I had also seen various people format spam reports in different ways and couldn't work out the way they wanted it to be done, so I asked and got a very helpful reply, and pointed to a wonderful python script that runs from the terminal called reportspammer. If I remember correctly it was the developer Tobias himself who pointed me to it, and regularly does his part in reporting spammers and keeping Identi.ca a pleasant experience for everyone who uses it.

Being a script you don't need to install it, I simply unzipped it, renamed it from reportspammer.py to .reportspammer.py so that it could sit hidden in my home folder. You do have to configure it with your Identi.ca account info first however. Either run the script and it will create the file for you with the account info blank, or create the file in yourself in your home directory called .statusnet_report_spammer.ini and paste the follwing into it and add your account details.

username  =
password  =
apipath   = http://identi.ca/api
recipient = support
group     = spamreport

To report a spammer simply:

~/.reportspammer.py ThistleWeb "spamming groups with anti-spam advice"

That will send the following:

@support !spamreport @ThistleWeb User ID: 123456 spamming groups with anti-spam advice

I am of course not a spammer, I just used my own Identi.ca ID as an example. Right now it fails if the spammer account has been deleted and therefore can't find an existing user by that name, as of now it's on the todo list to be fixed. This is what open source is about, helping out where you can and being responsive to issues. I urge all Identi.ca users to play their part in ensuring it's a hostile place for spammers, either volunteer to help moderate, or at the very least report them when you see them. The reportspammer.py script works a treat for that. Tobias uses Linux, as do I; I have no idea how this works on other OS's. The script is a simple way but the object is what it sends, not what created the Dent.

*Update*

I've just been told by Tobias that if you change the apipath it should work fine for Twitter, although the username to report to and group may be different, you'd have to check that. I don't use Twitter directly, I post to Identi.ca which cross posts for me to Twitter. It may however fall foul of the same 0auth changes that currently render Pino and plenty of other clients useless.

apipath   = http://twitter.com/api