On 7/28/06, Dan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Fortunately, we're low-load enough now that one person can periodically check all recent edits and IP ban spammers. And, since Hisham and I have started doing it, the rate at which we've been spammed seems to have gone down somewhat, which I think is a good sign.
Looks like the spammers use tools that look for some standard named wiki pages, such as "Main Page", "Mailing List", etc. I think protecting those has been effective. I don't remember seeing much spam in the rest of the wiki.
Unfortunately, however, it's probable that as the rest of the world slowly realizes that Gobo makes infinitely more sense as a desktop OS than FSH-based linuxes (it's bound to happen eventually), that won't be feasible anymore.
Well, then there will be a lot of people to patrol the wiki. ;)
>> Let me know if there are any objections to that plan, or if you have >> any better ideas. > > HantsLUG have told me that their approach > http://www.hants.lug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?AntiSpam > works pretty well, but it's not MediaWiki and it's an arms race. Thanks for this and the other link. Here's another idea, based mostly on those two links: I could add some code to prevent offsite linking or HTML tags (a lot of the spam I've deleted has featured raw HTML) from IPs that weren't on a whitelist. I'd probably harvest the initial whitelist from headers on this and the other gobolinux mailing lists, as well as people in the wiki edit history. Anyone who tried to post an external link would get a friendly message saying that the wiki administrators had been notified of the attempt, and had to explicitly approve the edit before it took effect. Real people would have their edits approved and their IPs whitelisted. Robots would get banned. Readers would never have to see the spam.
I may be wrong here, but I think spam is being added automatically by tools, not by actual people sitting on the other end. So, any simple solution that made the posting process different from a standard MediaWiki install would already defeat the tool (assuming the tool is not written targetting our wiki specifically -- a pretty reasonable assumption ;) ). So, I suspect that a very minor change such as adding an extra field to the posting screen, saying: Type 12345 here: [ ] (not an actual image verification system, just typing "12345" really) would already stop the spam we've been getting. Like MJ said, it's an arms race, but I think the minimum possible effort that gets the problem solved for now is enough (but maybe I'm being an optimist). -- Hisham _______________________________________________ gobolinux-devel mailing list gobolinux-devel@lists.gobolinux.org http://lists.gobolinux.org/mailman/listinfo/gobolinux-devel
