[aprssig] APRS web messaging

[Steve Dimse]

On Aug 11, 2006, at 1:26 PM, Ben Jackson wrote:

> So you could seed the APRS message accounts with known hams (that you
> know personally or can vet from this list, for example).  Then just
> tell them to invite anyone they want, as long as they're sure the new
> guy is a ham and understands the rules.  After some kind of cool-down
> period you start giving the new guy the capability to invite people.

The problem here is that people will be tempted to give an invite to  
people who are not hams but they trust not to give further invites to  
others. In other words, Joe Ham gives an account to his wife, who  
then can message him. This abuse is very hard to detect.

While Joe Ham could gave his wife his password to message him under  
his own call, this abuse is easy to detect. When I was managing the  
APRS IS, I used a tool that saved every message from and to the same  
callsign and  reviewed them. There were quite a few, but almost are  
were messages like "Test". Maybe a dozen times I noticed messages  
containing significant content, a couple of those were club  
callsigns, where there could be more than one control op under the  
same call. In each of the remaining cases I contacted the offending  
ham to let them know they were busted, and the abuse stopped. A  
invitation tree system does not lend itself to such monitoring.

Steve K4HG