Re: Bug tracker tool we need

Alex Shulgin wrote:
> Jay Levitt<jay.levitt@gmail.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