Hello,

After writing my original email, I got a bit of feedback from the XEP's
author out-of-band. They suggested making the additional field less
'vague', by using more explicit options. We briefly discussed the options
provided by equivalent functionality in Mastodon. I can see the value in
that.

I'd like to avoid introducing a large amount of options, as those would
probably confuse and/or be ignored by end-users.

Instead of the one field that I originally suggested, lets have two
boolean-based fields:

   - Report to origin server
   - Share with third-party services collecting statistics

These options roughly correspond with the options given in the "software
support" listing on xmppbl.org (see https://xmppbl.org/software )

Furthermore, I suggest that the XEP:

   - Explicitly mentions that clients may offer the options to an end-user
   whenever they are reporting a spam message, but also could use a
   (configurable) default that is automatically applied.
   - Define that servers MAY ignore 'true' values when their implementation
   does not provide the corresponding functionality.
   - Define that servers MUST NOT invoke corresponding functionality when
   the fields are provided with a 'false' value.
   - Discourages (SHOULD NOT) anonymizing the report to the origin server,
   as it hurts processing without adding any significant protection: it is
   likely that the origin server can easily look up the original stanza in
   their local message archive anyway.
   - Allows (MAY) anonymizing any submission to third-party analytical
   services (with instructions: remove the 'to' but not 'from' address, to
   protect the reporter, but not the spammer)
   - Define what the servers should do when the fields are not provided,
   but when the server does implement the corresponding functionality. Should
   that be a SHOULD NOT?

Unless there's feedback on this list within the next few days, I'll draft a
PR that applies these suggested changes to the XEP.

Kind regards,

  Guus

On Mon, Feb 3, 2025 at 10:29 PM Guus der Kinderen <
[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> XEP-0377 describes a mechanism to report spam or abusive content to the
> local domain. While implementing the server-sided part of this, I was
> trying to think of useful processes that could follow a report.
>
> Some of those actions could include sharing the report with third parties,
> such as the origin server of the spam, or a centralized spam-related
> collection service (like xmppbl).
>
> There is a privacy aspect to this. An end-user that flags a particular
> message or entity might not realize or even appreciate that their report is
> being forwarded to others than the local domain.
>
> I suggest having an additional field added to the data structure that is
> already defined in the XEP. This field is used by the reporter to signal if
> they agree to share the report with third parties. Clients could present
> this option as a checkbox that reads something like "Allow this report to
> be shared with relevant third parties" (or better words).
>
> Kind regards,
>
>   Guus
>
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