Hello, I've been away for a while.... I think this is maybe an elephant in the room, or I missed all the previous discussion and everyone has "moved on," but I'm not sure how to search for previous threads, not sure what vocabulary to use....

My searches these days are often swamped with the trash that seems to be auto-generated by some scripts/programs that "hijack" Gnutella, people who are apparently engaging in deliberate denial-of-service type interference. Bogus files seem to be created in reaction to my search queries, and fake results then being "shared," so that real, valid results are often crowded out. The basic trash-mechanism seems to be to listen for query strings, then spit them back as results after appending certain other bogus strings and file extensions.

Would it be possible to offer a filter that actually blocks results containing the exact/complete search string? Or even a host auto-blocking feature so I could send out a couple "pilot-queries" with some meaningless but unique string, and whichever hosts responded with results containing that string would be automatically blocked, at least temporarily?

Perhaps the trashers' methods will simply adapt to defeat filter efforts...? Perhaps such efforts to combat the problem would be futile in the longer run? I'd hate to see developers drawn into a waste-of-effort. If someone could post links to previous discussion of these issues, that would be appreciated....

The problem with these kinds of filters is that the spammers don't have to use their real addresses, so they could just trick you into blocking people who have the content you want.

But while they don't do that, you can use phex to block them:

* Add a filter rule: block the senders of all replies.
* Activate it.
* Search for ”tuhniate trisn ebvcsgezb vcr sonrtcl sobvct” (or similar - sometimes you have to include some keywords to trigger the spam). All who answer get blocked for a week.
* Deactivate the rule.

Voilà - you just got rid of a good deal of the spam.

__________________

-> put this banner into your own signature! <-
--
Erst im Spiel lebt der Mensch.
Nur ludantaj homoj vivas.
GnuFU.net - Gnutella For Users
Draketo.de - Shortstories, Poems, Music and strange Ideas.