Chad wrote: >Well that was a fun experiment for an hour. Turns out captchas do actually >stop a non-zero amount of spam on non-test wikis. > >Mediawiki.org logs tell the story pretty clearly. > >This has been rolled back.
:-( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Log/delete I spent a bit of time poking around. The spam seems to primarily be related to page creation. A slightly smarter heuristic (such as requiring that your edit count be > 0 before you can create a page) might mitigate this. Disallowing edits that contain "<a href" might also help. The more I think about this, the more I wonder whether we should change the CAPTCHA model so that instead of applying CAPTCHAs in a blanket manner to types of actions (page creation, account creation, etc.), we could instead only force users to solve a CAPTCHA when certain abuse filters are triggered. Adding this functionality to the AbuseFilter extension is tracked at <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T20110>. By shifting from the current rigid PHP configuration model to a looser and more flexible AbuseFilter model, we could hopefully ensure that anti-abuse measures (warning about an action, disallowing an action, or requiring a CAPTCHA before allowing an action) are more narrowly tailored to address specific problematic behavior. Even triggering AbuseFilter warnings that simply add an extra click/form submission for specific patterns of problematic behavior might trip up many of these spambots. Robert, let me know if you want access on mediawiki.org to look at the deleted edits, though they're quite boring. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
