New Openfire plugin: Reporting Account Affiliations

I’m excited to announce a new Openfire plugin: the Reporting Account Affiliations Plugin!

This plugin implements a new prototype XMPP extension of the same name.

To quote the specification:

In practice, a server may not trust all accounts equally. For example, if a server offers anonymous access or open registration, it may have very little trust in such users. Meanwhile a user account that was provisioned by a server administrator for an employee or a family member would naturally have a higher level of trust.

Even if a server alters its own behaviour based on how much it trusts a user account (such as preventing anonymous users from performing certain actions), other entities on the network have no way of knowing what trust to place in JIDs they have not encountered before - they can only judge the server as a whole.

This lack of insight can result in the negative actions (spam, abuse, etc.) by untrusted users on a domain causing the whole domain to be sanctioned by other servers.

This new plugin allows for Openfire to report to other entities the relationship it has with a user on its domain.

Note: at the time of writing, the protocol as implemented by this plugin has not yet been accepted for consideration or approved in any official manner by the XMPP Standards Foundation, and this document is not yet an XMPP Extension Protocol (XEP). This plugin should be considered experimental.

The plugin will be visible in the list of available plugins of your Openfire instance in a matter of hours. You can also download it directly from its archive page.

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