hutcheson - 6:31 pm on Jul 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

Well, in every community the choice of community tools is always a "political" process. You can generate tools all day long, but if the people don't find them useful, they don't get used. On the other hand, if the people find tools useful, they'll ask for more of them.

You can assume that the ODP community is no different. Where people see the value in an automated approach, there will be an attempt (often multiple attempts) to create the automation. And there are always ongoing discussions of what can be automated, and how well the current tools work.

One early ODP example: Some of you may be old enough to remember when Yahoo was 10% or more dead links (back before before link ghouls or annual directory renewal fees, so dead links stayed dead and buried.) Robozilla was the first link rot checker for any major directory.

Internal automated spam approaches, we don't publicly discuss, because of the fact that, given access to quick turnaround on penetration tests, spammers can trivially breach any automated antispam approach. (For instance, consider the amount of marketing spam that passes through all of GOOGLE'S highly sophisticated automated tests--a regular complaint here.) But as long as spammers don't know what happens to their submittal spam, they can't adapt; they'll just keep wasting effort on techniques that don't work. I don't feel the lack of any specific automatic filters.