vouch

Created by Tantek.com on September 30

• Tue, September 30 tantek.com stub with dfn, to do, see also
• Wed, October 1 ben.thatmustbe.me first pass at vouch protocol summary

This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWebCamp wiki by expanding it.

The vouch protocol is an anti-spam extension to webmention.

See http://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2014-09-28#t1411927207068 for a braindump and Q&A (follows into next day).

Protocol Summary

If Aaron's blog supports receiving vouch webmentions, and Barnaby's blog supports sending vouch webmentions, then this is how they interact:

Presuppose that Aaron's blog has a friends page, or some public XFN list (following) Presuppose that Barnaby already has a private list of sites that link back to his own site (including URLs to prove that the link back)

Vouch Selection

1. User Aaron posts a blog post on his blog
2. User Barnaby writes post on his blog that links to Aaron's post.
3. After publishing the post (i.e. it has a URL), Barnaby's server notices this link as part of the publishing process
4. Barnaby's server does webmention discovery on Aaron's post to find its webmention endpoint (if not found, process stops)
5. Barnaby checks his own list of followers to see if Aaron is listed.
   • If so, Barnaby proceed to Sending with vouch set to the link stored with this entry.
6. Barnaby's server checks Aaron's home page for a list of friends and any non-nofollow links.
7. Barnaby checks if Aaron's list already contains his site.
   • If so, Barnaby stores this link in his private list and proceed to Sending with vouch set to permalink to the page on Aaron's site that contained this entry.
8. Barnaby compares Aaron's list to his own list of followers.
9. If Barnaby finds a match between the lists, he proceeds to Sending using the URL stored with the match in his list as the vouch value.
10. If Barnaby has not found any relation, he proceeds to Sending without a vouch value.

Sending

1. Barnaby's server sends a webmention to Aaron's post's webmention endpoint with
   • source set to Barnaby's post's permalink
   • target set to Aaron's post's permalink.
   • vouch (if any) set to permalink of a page that links to Barnaby's site, that Aaron will see as an acceptable source.

Receiving

1. Aaron's server receives the webmention
2. Aaron's server verifies that target (after following redirects) in the webmention is a valid permalink on Aaron's blog (if not, processing stops)
3. Aaron's server verifies that the source (when retrieved, after following redirects) in the webmention contains a hyperlink to the target (if not, processing stops)
4. Aaron's server checks for the existance of a vouch value. (if not, webmentions is marked for moderation and processing stops or proceeds to further spam filtering methods)
5. Aaron's server checks that the base site of vouch is either his own site, or a site in his friends list. (if not, webmentions is marked for moderation and processing stops or proceeds to further spam filtering methods)

to do

To be written up here in this wiki page from that braindump

• clean up vouch protocol flow summary
• vouch protocol flow details
• vouch FAQ

To be drawn and posted:

• vouch user-flow diagram
• vouch protocol-flow diagram

See Also

• webmention
• spam