openSUSE admin

Antispam is made more difficult by people expectedly posting machine logs on the service. There is some moderation implemented in the service, I was planning on adding flagging too, but didn't yet. I would be open to both contributions, ideas and also moderators to join in removing questionable content.

crameleon wrote:

I guess there will always be spam on a public service.

Yeah, I think that is a fact. I am only surprised it was never a problem before.

How to deal with offensive spam is a good question - most anti-spam measures I can think of (captchas, rate limiting, ..) do have impact on the user experience, especially since > the service is not only used in the browser, but using the command line susepaste script as well.

Let's check where the spams are coming from - hopefully they are coming via the website, in which case a captcha might help.

crameleon wrote:

moderators to join in removing questionable content

Feel free to add me.

Plus one here.

And this situation makes me wonder:
Should we implement some sort of Terms of Use?

That would make things clear for everybody, since it's a public service. And in
case drastic measures have to be taken against noncomplying parties, no one could
say: "But I didn't know that. Where does it state that?"

Any thoughts?

luc14n0 wrote:

Any thoughts?

Overengineering 😀

pjessen wrote:

luc14n0 wrote:

Any thoughts?

Overengineering 😀

No, no. I think that would be called "overlawyering" 😛

I mean, [ahem] from one lawyer to another (me puts on his lawyer hat!) [cough] [cough].
Being paste.o.o the way it is, do we know whether would there be any
liability, or some sort of legal concern? I take pastebin.com as an example, and
its "Terms of Service" [1].

By the way, for the record, Jacób told me on the admin chat room that the same
terms used around openSUSE would apply to paste.o.o as well. So, if there's
a pre-cooked text somewhere, I'd be happy to send a PR adding a link in the
bottom of page.

1. https://pastebin.com/doc_terms_of_service

Thanks for that response, very nice, chuckle!
I feel quite certain we (i.e. SUSE) are responsible for whatever is published on paste.o.o. That seems only too easy to deduce from similar platforms, social media etc.
Hence, to avoid any trouble, we should do what we can to keep unrelated stuff away from paste.o.o - which is why we talked about having moderation.
Wearing my lawyer's cap - because paste.o.o is essentially dedicated to a single purpose, I don't see any problems arising out of kicking out unwanted stuff.
paste.o.o is not Twxtter or Z or Facebork. It should be quite clear what is and what isn't wanted, I can't imagine any moderator having much trouble determining that, unless perhaps if it is in a language he/she does not understand.
Having said all that - by all means, let's add a link to some T&C text, it certainly won't hurt.

Mind you - focusing on the real issue for a moment, what's the status of the moderation?

pjessen wrote:

Thanks for that response, very nice, chuckle!
I feel quite certain we (i.e. SUSE) are responsible for whatever is published on paste.o.o. That seems only too easy to deduce from similar platforms, social media etc.
Hence, to avoid any trouble, we should do what we can to keep unrelated stuff away from paste.o.o - which is why we talked about having moderation.
Wearing my lawyer's cap - because paste.o.o is essentially dedicated to a single purpose, I don't see any problems arising out of kicking out unwanted stuff.
paste.o.o is not Twxtter or Z or Facebork. It should be quite clear what is and what isn't wanted, I can't imagine any moderator having much trouble determining that, unless perhaps if it is in a language he/she does not understand.
Having said all that - by all means, let's add a link to some T&C text, it certainly won't hurt.

Yeah, I'm thinking of something like what Ubuntu's paste [1] does. That should dot our I's and cross our T's, clarifying things considerably for John/Jane Does using the service. My real concern is random people that doesn't share our assumptions, and somehow we end up in a tough spot, legally.

Mind you - focusing on the real issue for a moment, what's the status of the moderation?

Well, I did two mass deletions on this Saturday - 07/29/2023. There were:

• Several pastes with very sketchy (Tor/ magnet) links with plenty of "tags" around, including child pornography;

• Content related to my red book dot com (it looked like posts, and very disturbing comments from some sort of comments section);

• Pastes selling stolen credit card information, and similar stuff.

Those were the most critical ones IMO. But there are several pastes with advertising waiting to get nuked.

1. https://paste.ubuntu.com/

luc14n0 wrote:

My real concern is random people that doesn't share our assumptions, and somehow we end up in a tough spot, legally.

That is sort of what I meant when I said "overengineering".
The regular, legitimate user is not a problem, we don't need to do anything about him.

Mind you - focusing on the real issue for a moment, what's the status of the moderation?

Well, I did two mass deletions on this Saturday - 07/29/2023. There were:

• Several pastes with very sketchy (Tor/ magnet) links with plenty of "tags" around, including child pornography;
• Content related to my red book dot com (it looked like posts, and very disturbing comments from some sort of comments section);
• Pastes selling stolen credit card information, and similar stuff.

Those were the most critical ones IMO. But there are several pastes with advertising waiting to get nuked.

Wow, I didn't know it was that bad.

Thank you for the great work, @luc14n0!

I don't think we need to keep this ticket open. The pastes in concern have been deleted, and there will always be new ones, making it sort of a routine maintenance task instead of a one-off incident.