Tim Starling wrote: >On 07/11/14 19:17, svetlana wrote: >> I would suggest to ask on a village pump and alter the configuration >>per local consencus. > >We tried that before and the answer was "OMG no", even though nobody >bothered to look at the logs. It turns out that the captcha we were >using was broken from the outset -- trivially solvable with OCR -- but >apparently that didn't affect anyone's opinion of whether or not it >should be enabled. > >According to reports from non-WMF users of ConfirmEdit, FancyCaptcha >has little effect on spam rate. See the table here for a summary: > >https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit > >Anyway, sure, let's ask on some more village pumps.
I think that's unfair. Wikis have a serious spam problem. People associate CAPTCHAs with spam prevention. On the English Wikipedia, one of the actions that results in the user being required to successfully enter a CAPTCHA is adding an(y?) external link to a page as a newly registered user. This, of course, in addition to the CAPTCHA presented when registering an account (consider that many new account creations only come about as the result of the requirement for an account to make a new page on the English Wikipedia). Why not disable the extension for a week and see what happens? If you're wrong and there's a marked increase in wiki spam (account creations and edits), then you can help devise a better solution than a CAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs are clearly not a sustainable fix to the underlying problems they were implemented to address, or so I think you're saying. If you're right and the CAPTCHA is simply ineffective and unneeded, we've eliminated some code from production and we can move on. In other words: what exactly is stopping you from disabling the extension? MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
