Show HN: SQRL – Anti-spam rules language Twitter acquired in 2018, open-sourced

Hey all, author here! This is a demo of the rules engine we built to fight spam/abuse on the internet. It was built based on learnings from Facebook & Google, while trying to make a language that makes it simple for anti-spam analysts to quickly (and safely) deploy rules to production.

Unfortunately it looks like the Twitter event feed is temporarily down (they're blocking it, possibly as part of shutting down the API on Thursday). I have a cache of events from a little earlier that I'm going to try play through the stream.

Show HN: SQRL – Anti-spam rules language Twitter acquired in 2018, open-sourced
websqrl.vercel.app

It says "Compiled! Running", and shows some code in their language, but the other half of the screen is just black for me.

I assume from the text on the page that it is supposed to be showing tweets and some kind of spam rule classification or something.

The Wikipedia Recent Changes demo https://websqrl.vercel.app/wikipedia however did show one element on the right side, with an article title, IPv6 address, timestamp, a piece of quoted text, and "Rules fired". The rule was "FirstEventSeen".

Looking at the code shown for the Wikipedia example, the demo rules are:

- Simple rule to make sure atleast one event shows up in the UI

- Flag any users using profanity (not a great spam rule! but easy)

So I suppose that with a bit more time some events might show up matching the second rule as well.

Meanwhile though, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Recent_changes_stream links to https://codepen.io/ottomata/pen/VKNyEw/ which has events flying across the screen in the hundreds. Would be neat with a demo of SQRL also having many events fly by like that, and perhaps with a pause button in case one wanted to stop it and have a look at some of the events.

Perhaps the Twitter demo example works like that when it works.

I see also that the SQRL code in the Twitter demo is also has a rule that is meant to ensure that at least one tweet shows up.

Definitely either something is currently broken, or it is connecting directly to Twitter from the browser perhaps, and Twitter is not letting my browser get any data from their API?

Ah! Yeah extremely poor timing. The Twitter API has stopped letting me fetch the events. Going to try see if I can fix it quickly.

In the meantime the Wikipedia demo should be working, although it is far less interesting (much less data so not much spam popping up.)

We used to use Smyte at my place of work prior to the twitter acquisition. Very cool stuff.

Ended up rewriting it in house. We ended up with a SQRL variant that is a restricted type-checked subset of python. It is not python however, just syntactically similar.

Sorry based on some other feedback I was just hacking away on turning off the profanity filter. Didn't think about the profile images (which we're not scanning, but typically is associated with them)

Version I'm pushing up right now has a

  LET ProfanityFilterEnabled := false;

that you'll need to tweak to turn it on.