[Wiki-research-l] Spambots and HTTPS

2015-09-01 Thread Pine W
I noticed after HTTPS was enabled by default that there were many fewer
spambots on one of the wikis that I monitor for recent changes. Did anyone
else noticed a decline in spambots after HTTPS was enabled?

This may be relevant to discussions about the highly active editor stats.
While I doubt that spambots and vandals succeed in getting to 100 edits on
the larger Wikipedias very often, rollbackers might. Additionally, a
reduction in spambots and spambot-related rollbacks might affect the number
of new accounts registered and the number of edits per month stats.

Pine
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Spambots and HTTPS

2015-09-01 Thread WereSpielChequers
As you say I doubt many spammers would get into the 100 edit a month league
before being blocked.

Of course a lot of rollbackers will be in the stats, and if there had been
a drop in spam then some of the spam fighters might drop below 100 edits a
month. But since the big announcement today about a 350 account sockfarm
that had been spamming Wikipedia, I think it would be odd if spam overall
was down on the year (I seem to remember some research a few years back
that showed spam steadily rising year on year)..

My experience of spammers who create articles is that once their article is
deleted they are often left with fewer than five live edits, so unlike
vandals many of the spammers will not make the 5 edit a month figures.

On 1 September 2015 at 20:58, Pine W  wrote:

> I noticed after HTTPS was enabled by default that there were many fewer
> spambots on one of the wikis that I monitor for recent changes. Did anyone
> else noticed a decline in spambots after HTTPS was enabled?
>
> This may be relevant to discussions about the highly active editor stats.
> While I doubt that spambots and vandals succeed in getting to 100 edits on
> the larger Wikipedias very often, rollbackers might. Additionally, a
> reduction in spambots and spambot-related rollbacks might affect the number
> of new accounts registered and the number of edits per month stats.
>
> Pine
>
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