#2687 - WOT (Web Of Trust) API integration into spam system for Composr

By PDStig
Added 2nd Jul 2016, 12:57 AM
0 views

Identifier	#2687
Issue type	Feature request or suggestion
Title	WOT (Web Of Trust) API integration into spam system for Composr
Status	Closed (rejected)
Tags	Type: Spam (custom)
Handling member	Chris Graham
Addon	core
Description	https://www.mywot.com/ The Web of Trust is a public database of domain reputations. Users can go on this website and give trustworthiness ratings for domains so others can be informed of how reputable domains are. WOT also has sophisticated algorithms to generate a confidence score, lessening the chance of reputation manipulation. --- I think it would be a valuable asset to Composr CMS if we develop the ability to integrate the Web of Trust into the Composr CMS system. Specifically, it would do the following: When a user submits content to the website, and such content contains links that contain a domain other than the configured website's domain, Composr would query WOT for the website's reputation. If any submitted links contain a reputation score below that in a configurable option, and the confidence level is greater than that of a configurable option, the submission would trigger a higher spammer confidence level. *API calls to WOT should be cached with the URL cache to prevent repeated API calls; WOT has a limit of 25,000 calls per day and 10 calls per second. That way, any cached reputations no older than X days would be used instead of querying WOT again.
Steps to reproduce
Funded?	No

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Comments

By Guest posted 2nd Jul 2016, 11:46 AM

I was wondering if I can go ahead and develop this Chris. I was planning to integrate it for lovinity.org nonetheless so I can go ahead and make code for it for Composr in general with your okay.

By Guest posted 2nd Jul 2016, 11:58 AM

I honestly doubt it will work well as a spam solution. I suggest taking a sampling of spam you've received, looking at the domains, and seeing if they are covered. My suspicion is you will find that the global spamming 'community' has tens of millions of spam domains, and this database has just some thousands of high profile scams.

By Guest posted 2nd Jul 2016, 12:44 PM

According to their website, they have 57 million domains in their database at the moment, with 10 million having poor reputation scores. According to another source, the total number of registered domains as of 2015 is 294 million.

So statistically, WOT has documented about 20% of registered domains.

In that case, you may be right. This may be better as an addon serving to alert users of submitting malicious links to the website... or serving as a check on clicked external links to warn users they're about to go to a poorly reputable website.

By Guest posted 2nd Jul 2016, 12:47 PM

Well it's definitely bigger than I thought, but still I think my advice holds - find some actual spam you were exposed to, and see if this would have blocked it.

If I am right, then this feature may be a good idea (but a lower priority) if we could auto-report links when we punish users for spamming to contribute to the services growth (I can imagine a set of checkboxes per link, and if checked that link(s) is reported.

By Guest posted 22nd May 2017, 1:05 AM

After some additional research and some valid claims made by others of WOT bias and violations of policies, I think this feature would be a bad idea. WOT is crowdsourced, not a professional analysis website. And they have been known to be biased about the data they provide on website ratings.

By Guest posted 29th Mar 2018, 12:14 PM

Closing this, because of:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3139814/software/web-of-trust-browser-extensions-yanked-after-proving-untrustworthy.html

Yet their website currently is advertising the extension heavily, which will no longer install. They're a zombie, with I think no active staff.