[Imc-web] UCIMC and Anonymity

[Mike Lehman]

Posters to the IMC network must have the presumption that their
anonymity will be respected.

The UC-IMC site has been running since October using a content
management system called Drupal. We moved to Drupal because the previous
site had become an enormous burden to maintain, owing to non-stop
spambot attacks that Dada (the previous software) was not able to
prevent; the editors were having to pull about a thousand spams a day, a
new one showing up every minute and a half. The spam issue was central
to the decision to move to a new software platform.

The Drupal software allows for the logging of IP addresses for comments.
As a group, IMC-Web decided that we will perform a very limited logging
of IP addresses under the following constraints:

(a) The log entries will only be visible to editors and administrators;

(b) The log entries will be used solely to spot spambots and determine
the appropriate IP addresses to block, not to determine the identity of
any anonymous poster;

(c) The log entries will be automatically deleted after 24 hours.

This, we felt, was the best balance between ensuring the anonymity of
posters on one hand while being able to block spambots -- of which we've
blocked several already -- before they render the site a nightmare
to maintain again.

As part of the recent restoration after the hard disk failure last week,
a former editor who no longer has editorial access had her editorial
access temporarily returned. She used that access to harvest IP addresses
of commenters on one particular thread before the log entries were
auto-deleted in order to identify anonymous posters. She then posted
what she found on another local blog (!).

We take this sort of thing very seriously. It represents the single most
serious breach of anonymity policy in UC-IMC history. We apologize to
those who have had their anonymity even partially violated by this act.
And we have taken steps to ensure that she no longer has access to this
data.

/s/
The IMC-web working group

PS If there are any questions, please address them to IMC-web at ucimc.org.