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Spam Reporting This document specifies a mechanism by which users can report spam and other abuse to a server operator or other spam service. &LEGALNOTICE; Experimental 0377 Standards Track Standards Track Standards Council XMPP Core XMPP IM XEP-0191 NOT_YET_ASSIGNED &sam; 0.1.0 2016-05-25 ssw

Initial version approved by the Council.

0.0.1 2016-05-21 ssw

First draft.

Many spam and abuse prevention techniques rely on users being able to report other users who are sending unwanted messages, or specific instances of abuse. &xep0191; allows users to block spammers, but does not provide a mechanism for them to report a reason for the block to the server operator. This specification extends the blocking command to optionally provide an abuse report.

Entities that support &xep0030; and abuse reporting MUST respond to service discovery requests with a feature of 'urn:xmpp:reporting:0' and with a feature for each reason supported by the responding entity as described in the relavant specifications. Eg. a response from a server that supports reporting and understands the abuse and spam reasons defined later in this specification might look like the following: ]]>

The payload for reporting abuse to the server takes the form of a <report/> qualified by the 'urn:xmpp:reporting:0' namespace &VNOTE;. Report payloads are reusable and MUST NOT be sent without first being wrapped in a stanza.

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Abuse reports MAY include a reason for the report and servers MUST tolerate unknown XML elements in a report without making assumptions about the semantic meaning of unknown elements.

This document defines the following reasons for a report:

<spam/>
Used for reporting a JID that is sending unwanted messages.
<abuse/>
Used for reporting general abuse.

Clients MUST include only one reason per report.

Reports MAY contain a user provided message explaining or providing context about the reason for the report. See also the Internationalization Considerations section of this document.

Never came trouble to my house like this. ]]>

To send a report, a report payload MAY be inserted into an <item/> node sent as part of a request to block a spammer as defined in &xep0191;. For example:

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Servers that receive a blocking command with a report MUST block the JID or return an error just as they would if no report were present. Servers then MAY take other actions based on the report, however, such actions are outside the scope of this document.

Clients that support sending reports as part of the blocking command SHOULD expose interfaces to both block a JID without reporting it as abusive, and to block and report a JID.

If one or more <text/> elements are present they SHOULD include 'xml:lang' attributes specifying the natural language of the XML character data.

This document introduces no additional security considerations above and beyond those defined in the documents on which it depends.

This document requires no interaction with &IANA;.

This specification defines the following XML namespace:

  • urn:xmpp:reporting:0

Upon advancement of this specification from a status of Experimental to a status of Draft, the ®ISTRAR; shall add the foregoing namespace to the registry located at &DISCOFEATURES;, as described in Section 4 of &xep0053;.

&NSVER;

The XMPP Registrar shall maintain a registry of abuse report reasons. All abuse report reason registrations shall be defined in separate specifications (not in this document). Application types defined within the XEP series MUST be registered with the XMPP Registrar, resulting in protocol URNs of the form "urn:xmpp:reporting:reason:name:X" (where "name" is the registered name of the reason and "X" is a non-negative integer).

®PROCESS; The name of the abuse report reason. urn:xmpp:reporting:reason:{name}:{ver} A natural-language summary of the reason. The document in which the report reason is specified. ]]>

This specification defines the following abuse reporting reasons:

  • urn:xmpp:reporting:reason:spam:0
  • urn:xmpp:reporting:reason:abuse:0

Upon advancement of this specification from a status of Experimental to a status of Draft, the ®ISTRAR; shall add the following definition to the abuse reporting reasons registry, as described in this document: Spam urn:xmpp:reporting:reason:spam:0 Used to report a JID that was sending spam messages. XEP-0377 ]]> Abuse urn:xmpp:reporting:reason:abuse:0 Used to report general abuse that is not covered by a more specific reason. XEP-0377 ]]>

An XML schema will be added before this specification moves to draft status.

Thanks to the participants of the XMPP Summit 20 in Austin, TX who discussed this XEP: specifically to Waqas Hussain, Kevin Smith, Lance Stout, and Matthew Wild. A special thanks to Daniel Wisnewski for giving the presentation that kicked off the anti-abuse work.