Hi,
In the early days of web popularity, a very nice irc-bot+paste engine was developed, allowing discussion on IRC to be very nicely combined with paste sharing to help the discussion. It was written in lisp and given the nice name of "lisppaste".
While the idea was great to start out, in its grand days, the bot even joined over 60 channels(!), it has gradually seen increases in abuse; initially "just" to spam IRC channels (which caused the bot to be removed from all channels, loosing most of its usefulness), later with lots of inappropriate content being posted.
Various measures were taken over time to reduce the attractiveness of posting to lisppaste: * disabling of the XML-RPC api (which integrated with emacs!) * removal from the IRC channels * addition of a captcha up to most recently even: * removal of the listing of posts
While the last measure was hoped to take care of the last incentive to post to lisppaste, it seems that links to the inappropriate content are posted elsewhere -- eliminating the need to list the pastes.
With the majority of pastes being irrelevant to lisppaste's purpose (supporting programmers discussing their code in IRC or other channels), because they're inappropriate content of some kind or another, my question to you all is:
What should we do with lisppaste? Should we simply remove it from the web? Should we put it in read-only mode* (so as to maintain the archive of relevant pastes)? Or are there other options? E.g. someone who wants to adopt lisppaste and invest the time and energy to implement measures to fight the spam and implement measures to discourage or disable posting of inappropriate content?
* If we put it in read-only mode, it's my opinion that the existing inappropriate content should still be cleaned. Any contributions to that effect would still be greatly appreciated.
Hi Anton,
On Sat, Sep 9, 2017 at 11:17 PM, Anton Vodonosov avodonosov@yandex.ru wrote:
The tar.gz is unavailable too.
The project homepage referred from http://paste.lisp.org/ contains only invalid links.
Which is an indication of the need for maintenance, I guess.
Logging through ssh I found this:
ls -l /project/lisppaste/public_html/lisppaste2.3.tar.gz lrwxrwxrwx 1 bmastenbrook lisppaste 42 Sep 25 2008 /project/lisppaste/public_html/lisppaste2.3.tar.gz -> /project/lisppaste/ftp/lisppaste2.3.tar.gz
But the /project/lisppaste/ftp/ referred to by this symlink doesn't exist.
Stas rewrote the code to use Hunchentoot (originally the code used Araneida). The new hunchentoot-based code is in one of his repositories: https://github.com/stassats/lisp-bots.git
Regards,
Erik.
09.09.2017, 23:47, "Anton Vodonosov" avodonosov@yandex.ru:
Off topic: is the source code only available as lisppaste2.3.tar.gz or is there a source control repository available online with a later version?
I'm asking not for the sake of future support - I used it only once or twice and there are other pastebins in case lisppaste is disabled. Just wanted to look through the code - maybe it has useful bits for other purposes.
Best regards,
- Anton
09.09.2017, 20:02, "Erik Huelsmann" ehuels@gmail.com:
Hi,
In the early days of web popularity, a very nice irc-bot+paste engine was developed, allowing discussion on IRC to be very nicely combined with paste sharing to help the discussion. It was written in lisp and given the nice name of "lisppaste".
While the idea was great to start out, in its grand days, the bot even joined over 60 channels(!), it has gradually seen increases in abuse; initially "just" to spam IRC channels (which caused the bot to be removed from all channels, loosing most of its usefulness), later with lots of inappropriate content being posted.
Various measures were taken over time to reduce the attractiveness of posting to lisppaste:
- disabling of the XML-RPC api (which integrated with emacs!)
- removal from the IRC channels
- addition of a captcha
up to most recently even:
- removal of the listing of posts
While the last measure was hoped to take care of the last incentive to post to lisppaste, it seems that links to the inappropriate content are posted elsewhere -- eliminating the need to list the pastes.
With the majority of pastes being irrelevant to lisppaste's purpose (supporting programmers discussing their code in IRC or other channels), because they're inappropriate content of some kind or another, my question to you all is:
What should we do with lisppaste? Should we simply remove it from the web? Should we put it in read-only mode* (so as to maintain the archive of relevant pastes)? Or are there other options? E.g. someone who wants to adopt lisppaste and invest the time and energy to implement measures to fight the spam and implement measures to discourage or disable posting of inappropriate content?
- If we put it in read-only mode, it's my opinion that the existing
inappropriate content should still be cleaned. Any contributions to that effect would still be greatly appreciated.
-- Bye,
Erik.
http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.
Read-only mode seems like the best solution. There are still many lisppaste links around on the web and in mailing list archives.
Vladimir
On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 1:08 AM, Vladimir Sedach vsedach@gmail.com wrote:
Read-only mode seems like the best solution. There are still many lisppaste links around on the web and in mailing list archives.
Given the fact that this is the only reaction about running the paste engine, I think there's nobody interested in fighting the spambots solely to keep a lisp paste bot running.
My conclusion then is that indeed we'll turn the service to be read-only for the purpose of maintaining the older pastes around.
There then is one remaining thing to be done, though: clean the current body of pastes from any abusive or inappropriate content.
Would anybody be interested in taking up the task to do such a thing? (btw, I'm not thinking of reading each and every one of the posts in the system; I'm more thinking of using bayes testing (like spambayes or spamassassin) to clean the system with "minimum" energy)
Regards,
-
Anton Vodonosov -
Erik Huelsmann -
Vladimir Sedach