Throttling options for user activity

[ubernaut]

i think we need to find someway to make spamming buddypress sites harder since buddypress site bare an inordinate amount of the brunt of spamming. this is my idea because i think it would be the easiest thing i can think of to implement and carries almost no downside.

[boonebgorges]

Can you please give more details about what you have in mind? What kind of user activity are you talking about? What specific types of throttling do you have in mind? Per-user-per-time-period? Or something more fine-grained, like per-user-per-recipient-per-time-period (as in the case of PMs)? Do you anticipate having admin panels to control this?

I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea of having some rudimentary throttling for some BP components, but I would like to have a clearer sense of what you have in mind, so that we can gauge (a) how much work it will be to implement, and (b) what percentage of BP installations will get an appreciable benefit from it.

[ubernaut]

well think you might be able to simply have one throttle for everything (any kind of activity that might be displayed on the front end) but I'm fairly open minded (maybe friend group requests should have a separate throttle).

In terms admin screen i think it would be just like the one in bbpress which is here (second line):

wp-admin/options-general.php?page=bbpress

[DJPaul]

We have a bp_core_check_for_flood() function that was ported from bbPress 2, which currently isn't used anywhere. Throttling makes more sense on forums, because people are replying to topics. For BuddyPress, it would only be useful for activity comments and private messages.

Note that throttles only really help prevent accidents; that is, hitting F5 and causing the form to submit twice, and so on. A determined spammer will figure out that interval very quickly (especially if BP ships with a default interval value).

Either way, this is not in scope for 1.9, but if anyone wants to write a patch, let us know and we can look at this in a bit more detail together.

[adamt19]

Being spammed is a leading cause of account deletion for us. Some users sign up and begin pasting scripted greetings at a rate of < 8 seconds per new message (new conversation.)

Adding throttling CAN discourage someone enough to take their BS elsewhere, where their return on effort is higher.

[DJPaul]

We're closing this ticket because it has not received any contribution or comments for at least two years. We have decided that it is better to close tickets that are good ideas, which have not gotten (or are unlikely to get) contributions, rather than keep things open indefinitely. This will help us share a more realistic roadmap for BuddyPress with you.

Everyone very much appreciates the time and effort that you spent sharing your idea with us. On behalf of the entire BuddyPress team, thank you.

If you feel strongly that this enhancement should still be added to BuddyPress, and you are able to contribute effort towards it, we encourage you to re-open the ticket, or start a discussion about it in our Slack channel. Please consider that time has proven that good ideas without contributions do not get built.

For more information, see ​https://bpdevel.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/our-awaiting-contributions-milestone-contains/
or find us on Slack, in the #buddypress channel: ​https://make.wordpress.org/chat/