Re: Bug tracker tool we need

Alex Shulgin wrote:
> Jay Levitt<jay(dot)levitt(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> (A quick Google shows redmine and especially Trac having spam issues
>> of their own.)
>
> Ugh, redmine (or trac for that matters) has nothing to with handling
> spam. I believe a typical bug tracker doesn't handle spam itself, it
> lets the mailing system do that.
>
> Surely you can throw in some captcha plugins to try to reduce the spam
> posted from the web UI.

Maybe I'm confused - Magnus et al, are we talking spammy issues/issue
comments/etc, or are we talking more about exposed email addresses?

I assumed we meant spammy issues, like blog comments - spammers post issues
and comments with links, to get PageRank to their sites. Email defenses
wouldn't help here.

Captchas are fairly pointless nowadays, assuming you have someone dedicated
enough to write a spambot against your bug tracker. Most of them (even
reCAPTCHA!) can be >80% defeated by software - many 99% - and there are
millions of humans hanging out on Mechanical Turk who'll solve them for you
100%. Modern anti-spam ends up being a machine learning and systems
exercise.. but that's another mailing list :) I think Google gets more use
out of reCAPTCHA for OCR tweaking than for anti-spam.

Jay