Spam and reports

There is no company behind Unseenet that reads everything and deletes what it does not like, and there never will be. That is the point. But a network anyone can post to is also a network spammers can post to, and some posts are worse than spam: threats, scams, illegal material.

This chapter is about how Unseenet deals with that without handing anyone power over anyone else: who can do what, how a post you report reaches the people who can act on it, and what they can do when it arrives.

The layers, from the bottom up

Nothing on this list can be switched off for you by someone else, and none of it needs a central authority.

1. Every post costs a little. Each article carries postage - a small proof-of-work - and a new key must ripen before it posts cheaply. A spammer who throws keys away pays the full price every time.
2. A group's owner looks after the group. Owners and moderators can withdraw posts, ban keys from the group, and approve posts in a moderated group (Groups).
3. Spam reports, from issuers you choose. Anyone can publish signed reports saying "these posts, or this key, are spam". Your client hides what the issuers you follow report - and only those. This chapter is mostly about this layer.
4. A hierarchy's maintainer can block a key in its whole hierarchy, for example someone who posts threats in group after group in dk.* (Groups).
5. A node's operator decides what their own node carries: they can drop a group, honour maintainers' blocks, or act on the reports of issuers they follow (The node).

And at every level: you decide what you read. You can ignore a person, leave a group, show what a report or a block hid, and stop following any issuer.

Issuers

An issuer is a key that publishes spam reports. Any key can be one - a person, a group of volunteers, a program that spots floods of the same text, the project itself. An issuer has a group of its own, reports@ followed by its fingerprint, where only it posts. Its manifest says what it reports and how (its policy), where to object to a report, and whether a program makes the reports.

A report names posts (by their Message-ID) or keys, each with a reason: spam, flooding, phishing, malware, illegal, or other. A key is reported for at most a year, so that a mistake, or a stolen key given back, does not follow its owner forever. A report about a post ends when the post does. An issuer can withdraw a report at any time.

The issuer is pseudonymous like everyone else. A report never names the person who told the issuer about a post.

Who follows which issuer

A report does nothing by itself. It hides posts only for those who follow its issuer:

Who	Follows	For
You	the issuers you choose	every group you read
A hierarchy's maintainer	names issuers in its hierarchy's list	the groups of that hierarchy, for everyone who reads them, by default
A group's owner	names issuers in the group's manifest	that group, for everyone who reads it, by default
A node's operator	names issuers in the node's configuration	what the node carries and passes on

So a new user who reads unseenet.* follows the project's issuer from the start, and spam there is hidden for them without them doing anything. But it stays their choice: under Spam reports in the client they see every issuer that hides posts for them and why ("named for unseenet.*", "named for alt.space.nasa"), and can turn any of them off. The project names its issuer for its own groups only, never for the whole network. Hierarchies and groups the project does not run - dk.*, say - are for whoever runs them to decide.

What a hidden post looks like

A post hidden by a report is never hidden silently. It keeps its place, and where its text would be it says who hid it and why:

⊘ Hidden by reports@unseenet: spam

with Show anyway and Stop following reports@unseenet right there. The group's title says how many posts reports hide in it. Your own posts and your contacts' are never hidden by reports, whoever reports them.

Hidden is not deleted. The post is still on the nodes, unless their operators chose otherwise, and anyone who does not follow the issuer sees it as before.

Reporting a post

When a post goes against a group's charter or the law, choose Report in its ⋯ menu - in a discussion, a feed, a comment or a chat (in the terminal client: Report post in the command palette). The report window shows the post, and you choose:

• what is wrong: spam, illegal, threats or harassment, or something else;
• who gets it: the group's owner and moderators, the maintainer of its hierarchy, the operator of the node you read it from, and the spam report issuers that apply to the group - each of them who can be reached;
• what you want to tell them, in Markdown, as long as you like;
• screenshots or documents - pictures and PDFs, which are sent encrypted;
• whether to report anonymously: then nobody can see who you are, and nobody can answer you.

Each person you send it to gets their own sealed copy, which only they can read. A sealed copy is signed by a one-time key, which cannot ripen, so it pays the full postage: sending to three people can take a few minutes. The window closes at once, and the client tells you when every copy has gone.

In an emergency, contact the police. Nobody on Unseenet - not the node operators, not the project - can see who anyone is or where they are.

When a report reaches you

A report arrives as a private post: the post it is about, its group and author, the reason, the note and any files. Where it arrives depends on why you got it - your own inbox, or a team inbox you read with others (see below). Your client shows Open the reported post, and if you are an issuer, Publish a spam report….

Then:

1. Look at the post in its place before you act. Read the group's charter.
2. Decide whether the report is right. If not, do nothing. Nobody is told.
3. Act as far as your role reaches:
   • As an issuer: publish a report of the post - and, if the author does nothing else, of their key for up to a year. It hides for everyone who follows you. The reason the reporter gave is filled in; you can change it.
   • As the group's owner or a moderator: withdraw the post, or ban the author from the group.
   • As a hierarchy's maintainer: block the author in your hierarchy, with a public reason.
   • As a node's operator: drop the group from your node if it should not be there at all, or act on an issuer's reports on your node.
4. Illegal material: do not keep copies, and report it to the police.
5. Answer the reporter if they were not anonymous - from a team inbox, your answer goes out as the team.

Team inboxes

A project, an organisation running a hierarchy, or a group of volunteers should not have to share one key, or each check a separate mailbox. A team inbox is an inbox up to 16 people read, each with a team key of their own made for that inbox only. Messages to it are sealed for all of its readers at once. Readers answer on the inbox's behalf - "Unseenet (operator)" - so nobody learns which person wrote. The owner key is needed only to change who reads, and can stay offline.

The team inbox is the natural place for reports: an issuer or a hierarchy names it as its contact, and every report sent to that issuer or maintainer lands there, where the team reads them in their everyday clients. An issuer can even live beside your own identity in your vault, so you publish its reports from the report itself, without opening anything else.

Becoming an issuer

Anyone can. In the graphical client choose Become a spam report issuer in the command palette; in the terminal client the same; on the command line unseenet reports start. You say what you report and how, and where reports sent to you should land - your own inbox, or a team inbox you read.

Nobody follows you because you exist. People, groups, hierarchies and nodes follow an issuer because they trust it, and stop when they no longer do. An issuer that reports things that are not spam soon has nobody following.

Why it is built this way

• No central list. A shared report group would be one place to flood, and whoever owned it would decide who may report. With an issuer per key, nobody stands between issuers and readers.
• Defaults without control. A new user should not have to find issuers before spam goes away. So whoever runs a hierarchy or a group may name some for its readers - and every reader may turn them off.
• Never cheaper. Nothing a report does can make posting cheaper or a key more trusted for anyone; if reports could, whoever issued them would hold the key to the network.
• Never silent. Something hidden says by whom and why, one click from being shown. Silencing by report only works where people cannot see it.

The details are in UN-RFC 0045 (spam reports), UN-RFC 0047 (team inboxes) and UN-RFC 0018 (hierarchies and their blocks).