have been looking at the database layout underneath the wiki,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Mediawiki-database-schema.png
which shows that the user's validated email address is there, in some
form. We should access that, and complain to the ISP involved.
There is a real risk of privacy problems if we go this route. We would
be opening up the database and extracting email addresses... something
I'm not so keen on doing... assuming they are not encrypted.
2) look up the complaint address on http://www.abuse.net/
One click takes you to the lookup page, where you supply the ISP, and
they supply the complaint address (usually, "ab...@whatever")
3) send them a note describing the user's undesirable actions. The usual
response from well-known ISPs is a return note saying that the account
has been cancelled.
Has this ever really worked? Especially in the case of most spams
coming via ISPs in countries that do not care to enforce any kind of
good internet behavior. I've tried this in the past... and only once
did I ever get a response. As well... IPs and emails are forged,
spammers often appear on a trackable point (eg a specific email account
or ISP) for one wave of spam, and then move on. or they use a
compromised Windows machine or email account to validate the accounts on
the Wiki.
Basically, I'm not convinced reporting them will actually work, or that
it's worth the effort and risk of opening up the database and extracting
account information.
name associated with them. This should yield at least a few entries for
those of us with clones or bots. It may show whole strings of spammer
IDs, with the same email. Again, we should complain.
We're not getting all that many Spam getting through anymore. The
SpamBots are stopped by the various spam control methods that are in
place (most are anyway). There are groups of known spam Wiki IDs -
almost all of which were created a couple years ago.
C.
--
Clayton Cornell [email protected]
OpenOffice.org Documentation Project co-lead
Sun Microsystems, Hamburg, Germany
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