Donations as a spam vector

[alanna]

This escort site has started backing Collectives as a way to show up as spam on their pages: https://opencollective.com/escort-girl

Short term, we need to shut this down and ban them from backing more Collectives.

Longer term, do we need an option for Collectives to reject/ban specific subscriptions? Or some other defense for this?

Honestly, I'm surprised spammers will spend real money to do this, but I guess you can never underestimate them. I wonder how other platforms who show supporters on pages deal with this?

[znarf]

@alannallama On the platform side, what we need is to define a policy that we can use to disable this kind of organization. Maybe, we also need to update our terms of service to include this policy.

• Collectives should also be able to refuse donations based on their own rules.
• Hosts should also be able to refuse donations based on their own rules.

[alanna]

This has come up a couple times in the last few days (here and here) so I think we need to solve it.

[Betree]

I think that #2097 would be a great way to solve this. Maybe we can tackle #2006 at the same time: we could, when admins click on User card > Remove member, add a confirmation like this:

Are you sure you want to remove _____ from the members of MyCollective?

This will remove the collective from the widgets and everywhere
they appear as a backer of your collective.

☑️ Also refund their orders

[Cancel] [Confirm]

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. We want to keep it in our todo list but haven't had the time to address it yet.
Thank you for your contributions!

[alanna]

Another example: https://opencollective.com/bluehost-vs-squarespace

[ghuntley]

Another example: reactiveui/rfcs#27

[Andarist]

I've encountered the same problem - people trying to boost their SEO, put backlinks or whatever. And that being their only motivation for donations.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. We want to keep it in our todo list but haven't had the time to address it yet.
Thank you for your contributions!

[Andarist]

BUMP for stale bot

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. We haven't had the time to address it yet, but we want to keep it open. This message is just a reminder for us to help triage issues.

[ghuntley]

Bump

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. We haven't had the time to address it yet, but we want to keep it open. This message is just a reminder for us to help triage issues.

[piamancini]

@sbinlondon - we can add this one to the github issue about donation spam. For everyone on this thread we've made this a priority - There's a slack channel #moderation you can join.

[sbinlondon]

@ghuntley @Andarist If you have any further ideas/comments on this issue please let us know, I'm writing a moderation proposal this week and will be including this issue in it.

[Andarist]

As I've mentioned somewhere on Twitter - would be great to have like a dedicated warning/information (copy-pastable) about a collective admin having a right to moderate the list as they see fit to exclude such SEO-boosting donors from being displayed automatically. If they still want to donate - I'm OK with that, but I'd like to be clear upfront that I don't want to host their "ads". Something like this should be displayed (opt-in? or maybe even better - as opt-out) before donations are made.

Having a manual control over which sponsors are displayed would be very much appreciated, it's a waste of time to bother your team with requests to hide some. Having an option to refund somebody would probably be a good idea as well.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. We haven't had the time to address it yet, but we want to keep it open. This message is just a reminder for us to help triage issues.

[znarf]

Closing the issue because:

• Collective Admins now have a "Rejected Categories" setting to prevent some kind of accounts to contribute
• Collective Admins can reject contributions from their collective page

This is live and is definitely helping There will be likely some follow up, but let's track this in more precise issues.