A new plugin has been made available for Openfire, our cross-platform real-time collaboration server based on the XMPP protocol. We have named this new plugin the MUC Real-Time Block List plugin.
This plugin can help you moderate your chat rooms, especially when your service is part of a larger network of federated XMPP domains. From experience, the XMPP community has learned that bad actors tend to spam a wide range of public chat rooms on an equally wide range of different domains. Prior to the functionality provided by this plugin, the administrator of each MUC service had to manually adjust permissions, to keep unwanted entities out. With this new plugin, that process is automated.
This plugin can be used to subscribe to a Publish/Subscribe node (as defined in XEP-0060), that can live on a remote XMPP domain, but curated by a trusted (group of) administrators). It is expected that this node contains a list of banned entities. When Openfire, through the plugin, is notified that the list has received a new banned entity, it will prevent that entity from joining a chat room in Openfire (if they’re already in, they will be kicked out automatically). Using this mechanism, moderation efforts centralized in one federated Pub/Sub service can be used by any server that uses this plugin.
This plugin is heavily inspired, and aspires to be compatible with, Prosody’s mod_muc_rtbl and the pub/sub services that it uses.
The first version of this plugin is now available on our website and should become available in the list of installable plugins in your instance of Openfire in the next few hours. Please give it a test! We are interested in hearing back from you!
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