Wiki Spam again

Justin C. Sherrill justin at shiningsilence.com
Sat Jan 26 20:54:07 PST 2008


On Sat, January 26, 2008 6:07 pm, Dario 'Capn Sonic' Banno wrote:
> Hey there,
>
> right some minutes ago, Dragonfly Handbook main page was completely
replaced with some spam, so I reverted it to the previous version. See
> http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.cgi/DragonFlyBSD_Handbook?action=diff
>
> You can see daily spams from RecentChanges page too.
>
> Well, a wiki is a great thing, but I think restricting page editing to
registered users only is really needed.
> What do you think about it?

Going by this: http://moinmo.in/HelpOnAccessControlLists - I think I've
changed the site correctly to allow only known users to edit or revert
pages.

This isn't great, because it locks out anonymous edits from people who are
legitimate contributors.  It may reduce spam, but there are spambots that
will register themselves.  I have been watching the rss feed of wiki
changes, and deleting/reverting spam changes as I come across them.  It's
usually on the level of a few each day, and nothing is lost.

Tell me if this is not working for people, and I can go back to the old
behavior.

An aside - If you see a spammed page, click the little blue 'i' icon on
the upper right, and you'll get a list of prior versions of the page -
click 'Revert' to go back to a pre-spammed version.  There is also a
BadContent page with a ginormungous regex that will catch most spam and
keep it from ever getting posted; this is why most of the spams that do
make it through are nonsense.  There is also an Admin right that can be
given out that lets people delete pages.

The captcha idea has been brought up before; the general notes in the past
for MoinMoin, the software for our wiki, have been "captchas are bad" for
various reasons.  There's been some discussion of a textcha here:

http://moinmo.in/TextCha

Where a text question is asked that only a human could easily understand. 
It doesn't yet appear to be a feature we can apply to only anonymous
users, if at all.

I don't follow MoinMoin development very closely, so there could be an
option that I don't know about or a plugin that could work better -
suggestions are welcomed.












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