Introducing Spamcheck: A data-driven, anti-abuse engine

What this post added

This post introduces Spamcheck, a new anti-spam engine for GitLab. It details the development process, including the creation of a spam testbed for passive data extraction and analysis, prototyping with a tech stack involving gRPC, Protobuf, and GoLang, and an iterative deployment strategy to production. The engine was initially deployed in monitoring mode and progressively expanded to all public projects on GitLab.com. The post highlights data-driven improvements, including performance comparisons with Akismet, and mentions ongoing work to reduce false positives by improving ML models and automating training processes.