Process for new account requests

[Karsten 'quaid' Wade]

Thanks to Rydekull and dneary, we are now getting email for the new
account requests to the wiki on ovirt.org. Yay!

In the last few weeks, two of these accounts we approved have in fact
been spammers. Boo!

The problem I'm having is that we get new account requests from people
and there is not enough information to tell at the beginning if it's a
human or a bot. (Or a human spammer, which we can call bot for simplicity.)

Also, my attempts to figure out who is a human or not can lead to
resisting or rejecting people who appear to come from generic domains,
e.g qq.com or because of a sketchy bio. Sometimes I can tell the source
email address seems to be professional, e.g. today it's
http://axonpro.sk. Thus we introduce prejudice against individual
contributors or people who use e.g. gmail.com instead, and cultural or
linguistic bias against incomplete, inconsistent, or oddly worded bios.

Some thoughts I've had for a process to follow when confirming an account:

* The email must be confirmed; that means that at least the address you
see can receive account confirmation email. We aren't yet taking
anonymous contributions, so having a way to reach out to people is a key
to being a contributor.

* Biography must not be nonsense; it's OK if it's a set of personal
keywords, e.g. today we got "pmd85 commodore plus4 286 dos windows linux".
** FWIW, I think this is where the longer biography that we earlier
shunned comes in useful - people have to write something real and
appropriate, which is harder for a bot to do.
** Of course, the bio works against people for whom English is not a
language they are very good writing in. (Thus, higher barriers due to
language and/or culture.)

* If there is anything suspicious looking or incomplete or otherwise
just doesn't make you feel safe granting access, send email to the
individual asking for more details to prove they are human.
** Is this idea a bit rude? I figure, if you are clear and concise it
should be OK:  "Hi, I'm checking from the oVirt wiki account system that
you are really a human. We've been having trouble with wiki spam. Can
you please tell me a bit more about your interest in oVirt?"

Any other ideas or thoughts?

Cheers - Karsten
-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Analyst - Community Growth
http://TheOpenSourceWay.org  .^\  http://community.redhat.com
@quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC)  \v'  gpg: AD0E0C41

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