Handling spam in comment edits on Trac

[johnbillion]

A new pattern has been seen on core Trac recently where a comment gets published and then subsequently edited to include hundreds or thousands of spam links.

An example from today is ​https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/60789#comment:34 - be warned that opening this URL will probably lock up your browser due to the high number of links in the comment.

There have been several dozen examples of this pattern over the last couple of months. The main problem is causes is that it prevents contributors from interacting with the ticket once the spam links have been put into place.

What can be done about this? Is there an anti-spam measure that can be implemented when a comment gets edited?

[dd32]

This is pending work from systems (who were waiting on my go-ahead on testing Trac)

The trac anti-spam module needs to be updated, which requires updating trac, which requires updating other trac plugins, which requires.. etc..

[johnbillion]

This is pretty prevalent now, occurring almost daily. Can we get this implemented? Or can we just throw Akismet in front of comment edit submissions?

[johnbillion]

Alternatively, how about disabling the comment editing feature for new accounts?

[dd32]

Or can we just throw Akismet in front of comment edit submissions?

That's what the Trac update is for, the version we're running doesn't run it's spam-checks on edits (Which that spammer knows), only on new comment submissions.

how about disabling the comment editing feature for new accounts?

I don't think Trac has the ability for us to do that in it's permission models, and Trac itself has no context of how old an account is.

I'll raise it with systems..