[Haskell-cafe] ANN: Hackage Account Registration Changes

[Gershom B]

As some people have seen, a spammer has started to create accounts on
hackage to upload fake packages, in order to use their
package-descriptions for linkspam. We'll be working to clean-up the
package-index from this spam, and the accounts have been disabled.
Further, we'll need to decide on some long-term changes going forward
to make this sort of abuse more difficult.

In the meantime, as a short term measure, we have changed new account
registration policies on hackage.

Users can still register as before, but new users do _not_ have upload
rights until they explicitly request them and are granted them by a
human being.

(This is actually how we had configured hackage to work on initial
deployment -- we loosened things up for some years as the extra step
seemed unnecessary).

Apologies for the inconvenience, but this seemed the most direct way
to stop the current influx of spam.

Users with existing hackage accounts should encounter no differences
in behavior.

Best,
Gershom