Dear all,the two measures that we had to implement for the CCP4 wiki (<http://strucbio.biologie.uni-konstanz.de/ccp4wiki/index.php/Main_Page>) to keep spam in check is - a) requirement to solve a "recaptcha" during account creation, and when inserting an URL (http://...) into an article
b) blocking account creation for gmail.com email accounts
Both together seem to work well.The first is a rather general way (which many wikis had to implement) to prevent bots from mass-creating accounts and mass-inserting spam articles. The second may sound draconic and hurts "real" gmail.com accounts, but it is required since the spammers have found a way to have real people solve the recaptchas (at low frequency), and (exclusively, so far) use gmail.com email addresses.
_So_, anybody who wants to edit pages on CCP4wiki and fails to create an account since s/he's using a gmail.com email address should get an email account from somewhere else.
Reading CCP4wiki of course does not require an account. best, Kay On 01/30/2011 06:20 PM, Kay Diederichs wrote:
Dear all, the ccp4 users' wiki at http://strucbio.biologie.uni-konstanz.de/ccp4wiki/index.php/Main_Page was, during the last couple of days, the target of some wiki abuse/vandalism. To clear the mess, we deleted those newly-produced articles containing advertising links, and removed the fake users. Yesterday we had to stop creation of new user accounts. On Tue, we'll re-enable it to see what happens. Furthermore, we protect user creation now with a "captcha" mechanism which should be effective against bots - but unfortunately there seem to be people behind these efforts so this is not 100% effective against the current attack (it does slow down, though). In addition, we might in the future enable the "captcha" mechanism for those edits which insert new outside URLs into existing articles. In summary, _reading_ the wiki is still possible, but creating new user accounts (which is necessary if you have never before created/edited an article in the wiki) is currently suspended and will be re-enabled in the near future - but with a captcha. Sorry for the inconvenience for new users! Kay
-- Kay Diederichs http://strucbio.biologie.uni-konstanz.de email: kay.diederi...@uni-konstanz.de Tel +49 7531 88 4049 Fax 3183 Fachbereich Biologie, Universität Konstanz, Box M647, D-78457 Konstanz This e-mail is digitally signed. If your e-mail client does not have the necessary capabilities, just ignore the attached signature "smime.p7s".
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
