3 ms·
I love the privacy thing. With some chat clients I stopped using them, or turned off features to protect ips being leaked from each room participant to all the
by stevenicr 8y ago
I love the privacy thing. With some chat clients I stopped using them, or turned off features to protect ips being leaked from each room participant to all the others in the room. It's important for safety and security.
I believe this is what would cause us to force the use of a stun/turn server if we switched to web sockets. I have seen nefarious users pull and use ip info from chat rooms in many ways for blackmail and worse.
I've also watched some of these wicked people use other tricks like share a picture in the chat room - then check their server logs to see which ips pulled the jpg request - then use that info to hack everyone's home routers, pull their pics, put them up..
So yes I get the importance.
However I can assure you that times are coming where people are going to need better blocking tools with these chat systems.
The main reason I have not started testing with the riot / matrix with my groups of users is becuase I would feel bad for those other people who run instances - as they would be flooded with a few groups of evil wicked trolls - and since there appears to be little moderation ability - it would quickly ruin the chats of all who allowed any user sign ups.
They are coming, it's just that matrix has not been pointed out as a ripe target yet. They will spam, for fun and profit. They will send bots, they will send dozens of humans to do it. Then they will post stuff to make everyone ill - nazi stuff, child prn stuff, all the things you don't want in your system and your other users will leave if they see it.
Whatever you do to ban them, they will return. If it's possible to come back with a new ip and a new email addy - they will be back with six identities before you finish banning the last one. They will register names that look like other's in your system. Heaven forbid you have not blocked blank space ascii/unicode characters..
When these groups of people find that it frustrates you to have your system turned into 4chan, then the real fun begins. Even if you can see their ips it won't matter, they have access to thousands of subnets.
Anyhow, I hope more moderation tools come to riot / matrix / etc - I would be fine with giving my appointed moderators the ability to click to block subnet and have the server do it even if the moderators could not actually see the ip of the individual.
The blocking is most important. Some of my mods look at ips to try to determine cases where someone is suspected of being an imposter and things like that - but that's not as needed. All of my moderators have made agreements with have about ips and personal info during the training process and get how important we take privacy.
I would think this is going to be extremely important with the federated options and such.
- Arathorn 8y agototally agreed on being able to block abusive users. but being able to spy on their IPs does not help much in doing so.
- stevenicr 8y agoAnything we can do to make it easier to block bad users I am all in. Perhaps we could have options to let moderators see hostnames or something instead? maybe even some kind of hashed code.. thing is we currently use mods seeing ips to determine imposters, and to determine when someone comes into the chat room with multiple usernames at the same time. This is not 100% solution sure, and it's legacy tools we are talking about - but it has been immensely helpful many times. Some of the worst trolls will come in with a dozen usernames at the same time. When you kick one out of the room - the other 11 can still troll. Being able to see an ip of different users can give clues as to whether or not other suspicious behavior is indicating more nefarious stuff. So far being able to ban via ip subnets and cidr has been the most effective method for stemming most of the spam bots and abusive trolls we have encountered. We do get some smart ones that log in with a dozen different ips from a vpn service - and that does make things much more difficult - it that does come at a cost to the troll as well - so it's worth doing. I think the instance / server admin may need to view ips to unban if it's an issue - but maybe the moderators just need to see a numeric hashed representation so we can see that sally45 and billy 29 are not in the room from the same connection? Or hostnames or some other thing. I am open to all ideas on this front. I have spent hundreds of hours dealing with banning chat room users and unbanning people on occasion. So far the rudimentary moderation tools of the old realchat from 15 years ago are better than the modern chat systems we have tried out (rocket chat, riot, etc) - hopefully this will change soon.