problem submitting R bug; bug plotting in tiling window manager

Ah, thank you for that explanation. I somehow didn't catch that my
Bugzilla account had been disabled by a human.

"Common pattern is to post ... something copied from a generic bug
report" - that sounds very annoying.

Frederick

On Sun, Feb 07, 2016 at 11:54:11AM +0100, peter dalgaard wrote:

Unfortunately, the spammers in question appear to be human (of sorts). 

We're not sure what they're up to, but a common pattern is to post random text, or something copied from a generic bug report (like "able to add 6 item"), later followed by a comment containing a link or a file attachment. 

Presumably, it is some sort of click-bait scheme, but it could also be a covert channel for contrabande files. At any rate, it is very hard to distinguish by mechanical means. So it is done by eye, with some risk of Type-I error. Thus, the Bugzilla maintainers are pretty vigilant to stamp out spammers, sometimes edging on being ham-fisted (er, -footed?).

-pd

On 07 Feb 2016, at 00:25 , frederik at ofb.net wrote:

No problem.

Another suggestion would be to simply validate user input like most
websites, and reject invalid submissions immediately, rather than
blocking the user's account. I don't know what kind of spambots you
are up against, but unless they are very intelligent I doubt they'll
be able to understand a message like "You submitted a bug with no body
text, please enter something and try again." There may also be the
option of using Captchas.

Not sure how hard it is to get Bugzilla to do these things.

Thanks,

Frederick

P.S. (I now see that all errors on the bug tracker are displayed with
a red background)

On Sat, Feb 06, 2016 at 03:00:21AM -0500, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

Thanks for the suggestions.

Duncan Murdoch

On 05/02/2016 10:07 PM, frederik at ofb.net wrote:

Hi Duncan Murdoch,

Thanks for your time. I apologize for not telling you that my email
address on the bug tracker is slightly different -
"frederik-rproject at ofb.net" vs "frederik at ofb.net". I was going to
follow up with this information, but then I thought, he probably knows
how to find a tagged email address.

I do hope that you are able to fix the bug tracker. In particular,
people should be made aware that their account is blocked before being
invited to submit a bug. The error they get should be less rude - no
need to make it red - and the email address in the error should be
filled in. You complained about wasting time having to look for my
email address - well, I wasted time looking for yours. The error
message could even hint at what triggered the ban. I don't think that
you're going to get very far by trying to scare off actual spammers
with a big red accusation - I imagine they all have pretty thick skin.

Reading the first line of my bug report was generous of you, but if
you read the rest, you'll see that, indeed, after checking with the
knowledgeable i3 guys, it appears to be an R bug. So I would like to
submit it. What appears at the top of my bug report is a copy of the
original bug I posted to i3, at the linked URL (are links OK or will I
get banned again?).

The reason a bug appeared with the subject "til" is because I noticed
that when typing into the subject field, some "related bugs" come up.
However, this "suggestion" process appeared to be stalled when I typed
"til" (for "tiling" or "tilable"). I tried hitting "enter" and it
ended up opening a bug with that subject, which I never submitted,
because I clicked "back" and figured out that *four* characters are
actually necesary to start getting suggestions. The whole point of
doing this was to see if another bug had been submitted with the same
topic, and thereby save you time! I'm not going to try to reproduce
this error, because you said it will get me banned again, but I think
somebody should try to fix the site so that people don't get banned
for any content which is not submitted. Especially people with
months-old accounts, like me.

I definitely sympathize with the spam problem, and thank you for your
hard work. Best wishes,

Frederick

On Fri, Feb 05, 2016 at 08:19:40PM -0500, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

On 05/02/2016 7:26 PM, frederik at ofb.net wrote:

Dear Dirk Eddelbuettel and Duncan Murdoch,

Thank you for your work on the wonderful R project!

I recently attempted to submit a bug with your Bugzilla interface:

https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/enter_bug.cgi

I created an account, typed in all my information, first checking
details with another project. Then I clicked submit, and was taken to
a web page with a big red banner, it said

 Spammer
 If you believe your account should be restored, please send email to explaining why.

What a hostile thing to say to your users! I tried resubmitting my
bug, but removing any links, and I still get the message - so it looks
like my account has really been blocked. Please do something to warn
your users about this so they can avoid the upset.

Your account isn't blocked now, but it wasn't easy to unblock it: you used a
different email address in the submission, not the same one you used in this
email.  At least one of the people who can deal with this kind of thing
would now demand an apology from you before ever reading your email again.
I won't do that, but I have to admit, I don't like the fact that you wasted
10 minutes of my time. I'm Bcc'ing a couple of people who are working on
putting together a better interface to the bug reporting system, so they
know to deal with this kind of issue as well as all the others.

I'm not hostile, I just sound that way, because I've wasted a lot of time
this week on issues like this.

Duncan Murdoch

(Here's my previous email to you, for the benefit of those who are Bcc'd:

You posted a bug report, but it had no content other than "til".  That's
what many abusers of the system have done, so you were blocked.

I have read the first line of your bug report, and it says " I'm not
sure if this is a bug with i3 or R ".  If you're not sure if it's a bug
or not, then please post to R-devel.  That's a moderated list so if this
is your first post, it may take a while to appear.

This probably seems unreasonable to you, but a lot of abuse is sent to
the bug list, so we block it quite early.  I'll unblock you now, but
please don't post there again unless your discussion on R-devel
indicates this is a problem with R rather than i3.

Duncan Murdoch

Well, I don't know what it means to "email to explaining why", so I
tried to subscribe to R-devel. However, it's been ten minutes and no
confirmation email. So I tracked down your email addresses from the R
website. I'm still cc'ing r-devel.

I hope it is OK to send the bug by email. I really want to get back to
what I was doing, but I don't want to lose the work I put into writing
this bug report, so I'm attaching it to this message.

Thank you,

Frederick Eaton

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Office: A 4.23
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com