Create an analyzer that checks for simple, ignorable non-text changes

[Mr0grog]

As a first test of all the things needed to automatically rate a change’s significance, priority, let’s start with something simple that looks for changes that we can pretty confidently say aren’t meaningful:

• No changes to the page’s text (except whitespace changes and punctuation, like ' → ’)
• Attribute changes that are not for title, alt, href, or src (any others?) are not important

Example: https://monitoring.envirodatagov.org/page/b2b0b8cb-5e9b-4178-91c0-b8cb4466d2bd/b76dd1ab-a7aa-41d6-89f3-c45117a80dc5..2b55beed-db97-4249-b30a-600f61d94eb5

This is an easy analysis to do (and covers a lot of the kinds of changes I think we see), so it’s a good way to make sure we’ve built out:

• a working pipeline for proactively analyzing new versions added to the DB
• a style and format for organizing analysis code

[Mr0grog]

At this weeks analyst meeting, CAPTHAs came up as another constantly changing thing that is hopefully easy to identify.

Also:

• ASP.net postback/session data
• Invisible form fields (would cover the above ASP.net stuff)

More far out:

• Simple heuristics for identifying “related links” sections?
• Allowing selectors for sections of the page to ignore as an argument?
  • To be usable, we need to add the ability to store a list of ignorable selectors in DB, but that’s separate work

We should probably turn this issue into an umbrella/epic issue for all these different ideas and pieces of work.

[Mr0grog]

From some BLM examples @jschell42 sent me:

• Cache-breaking hashes/unique values in subresource URLs (e.g. for CSS, JS)

• Changes to id, class, name attributes (and moving those attributes).

• Changes to title attributes probably should be accounted for somehow, but a) are hard to see and b) probably aren’t a big deal (so they should only matter a tiny bit, if they matter at all).

• Addition/removal of empty title or maybe any attribute? (Might need a special list of attributes that have meaning just by their presence, like checked.)

• Maybe just anything that’s non-text/image?

• Amount of textual change?

  • % of total words?
  • Simhash?
  • Zhang-shasha?
  • ?

• <meta> modified date? e.g:

  <meta name="dcterms.modified" content="2018-06-11T11:58:04-04:00" />
  

There’s definitely an interesting thing here I wasn’t thinking about before… we could make a big split in prioritization based simply on textual (+ images and such) content changes. I can see some super-useful annotation data we could display for analysts (especially in their sheets) like:

• Did text change? y/n
• % text change

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Some diffs for examples:

• https://monitoring.envirodatagov.org/page/06347058-b727-468b-910f-d0bb1ff7a765/5e895b22-938d-45f7-bb24-2bd7fc0885a7..9c032ddc-6bfe-4d99-a650-5c81a38bdeea
• https://monitoring.envirodatagov.org/page/0a00eb76-2d5a-49ba-99a3-e532f4306690/e7f4b907-1e9f-48e9-84e2-90660ab4e1c9..74fb35e8-9019-4488-8a24-0401f8476c1d
• https://monitoring.envirodatagov.org/page/3ce1df73-126a-446c-b17e-2933fa42596b/864a4f4b-ac8b-402b-8241-162942050966..43491156-0a5d-48ce-a0ef-b0ef0f1c2323
• https://monitoring.envirodatagov.org/page/3d012582-b86c-4d00-85ba-8322a4c6b4d0/56f02206-6f54-46cf-9924-8ac82037f11d..c85ec25e-0c35-404f-849e-f4f51b771217

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[Mr0grog]

Another example of something that should really be totally ignored: https://monitoring.envirodatagov.org/page/c4328d30-cada-452f-8642-4bff721f5fc2/9a448c37-9285-4107-9ffd-ea72214561a4..a8fab661-07bb-4409-92f7-f73deadf4e29 (change to class attribute)