"Scrap All" Defense Plan
Posted by Jesse Andrews on Dec 23, 2007
Now that the site has been upgraded to the current version of rails, I can move forward with making it so the "Scrap all" plague doesn't kill the site. This involves: 1) adding non-public flags to scripts so they don't get shown in public areas 2) adding a "group/community" feature
The Scrap All "attack" is relentless; the result being a denial of service attack against the regular users of userscripts.
I see 2 issues:
1) Making it so new/unwanted scripts don't flood the common area
The front page, and browsing of scripts has always sucked, but when you get a flood of unwanted scripts, the design flaws cause hte site to be non-functional. People have always uploaded personal/testing scripts, causing frustration, but the velocity at which scrap all keeps coming has pushed it over the top and requires a new design.
One part of my proposed solution would be the ability to mark scripts as "non-public." Those scripts would not be shown in: script search, the home page, browsing through the scripts page, or browsing by tags. They would still be visible at their url, and linked from the authors page. (and there will be the ability to choose "show all" which will include non-public scripts as well)
Phase 1 of this part of the solution would be taking flagged scripts and then admins using their judgement on if they should be hidden (eg, we don't want to hide a good script just because a single user voted to hide it). The purpose will be to hide all the scrap all, and other test scripts.
Phase 2 will be voting by the community. So when a script is down voted enough it will disappear from the public. I'm not sure the exact mechanics/rules of this yet. Discussion is welcome!
2) Making it easier to find scripts you want.
Even if we fix the problem of unwanted scripts appearing on the homepage, the site still is not very navigable.
To fix this I think creating "groups/communities", where scripts and discussions about the scripts can occur. These communities might be around a site (flickr, gmail, google, twitter, livejournal, orkut, ...), or they might be around a topic (better search, libraries, books, pictures).
Scripts can be added by members of the group. The group can choose what scripts they want, and what ones are hidden.
Discussion boards for both users, as well as about script development for the site.
Please discuss if you have opinions/ideas on how improving the experience!
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A couple of suggestions for the front page:
1) Can you say something like "userscripts is a collection of Greasemonkey scripts", and then give a link to Greasemonkey's site and a link to install Greasemonkey? Right now greasemonkey isn't mentioned at all and it needs to be.
2) The current way "recent comments" is implemented isn't very useful as I have no clue who the people are or what they are commenting on. Could you change it to show the name of the scripts that have recently been commented on?
3) It will be more work, but having "top scripts" based on number of downloads over a day/week/month/ever would be very helpful.
4) I am not quite sure what "recent scripts" means. Does it mean recently installed? Recently added? Recently updated?
Also, on the script page, can you add something about how greasemonkey is needed to run these scripts? Lots of people click on "install" without first having installed greasemonkey because they don't know any better.
Thanks for all your work on this site.
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I'm looking forward to this. I think it will help us all.
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I review all new scripts via RSS. An RSS feed that would exclude scrap feeds would be most welcome.
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More aggressive means are necessary...there should be a "terms of service" agreement when a new user account is created that specifically states something about spamming the site, Now that there is a T.O.S., delete those spam scripts completely and delete the user account for violating T.O.S., And every user account should have a different e-mail address upon registering, If there are 2 users wich both have the same e-mail address then delete both users...these could be bots...if not then who cares...we're enforcing rules here...that's just my 2 cents.
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Miguel: You could easily achieve that with Yahoo Pipes.
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I've added sorting on the scripts page (deployed) and have been working on implementing community features...
Here is a screen shot of what I'm working on:
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Miguel (and Henrik): Someone has already made an RSS feed with Yahoo! Pipes that filters out Orkut and scrap scripts: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ClcVZ...
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It is looking good Jesse. Keep us updated.
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@Jess
Could you please add a Facebook community?
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sizzlemctwizzle,
Of course!
The current idea is that any tag can become a community. (so to add scripts to a community, you tag it with the community tag name).
I'll post more about it tomorrow.
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Is this flood coming from a specific IP range?
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Rohit,
They don't appear to be... They all appear to be real users.
Jesse
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Can you disable adding scripts that has *orkut.com/Scrap* in @include? Or just make it /scrap/ig
I don't know but is temporarily suspending user account creation a solution?
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I'm checking on new scripts several times a day... ASAP I'll want to move to not having to do this manually. What I don't want to do is ban all orkut scripts...
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Just block orkut for now. There's nothing useful coming in.
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Its just gone crazy today, The board is full of scrap all scripts!
I wish i could see an improvement in the situation, But it seems worse thab ever!
Whats going on ?
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I had a small conversation with one of the "scrap all developers" and he uses this site to host scripts after every change he makes. He did not know that he could develop and test locally. He's probably trying the script to work after hotlinking!
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maybe it would be useful to limit the uploadable scripts per an hour or something like that.
maybe with some fine tuning like if the user was registered long time ago she/he could upload more per an hour
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hihihi