On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 11:08 AM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote: > 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.
Big +1 for this. Then, if a wiki community really wants to use CAPTCHA on all account creations or link additions, they can add that as AF rules. I am quite sure that on English Wikipedia the AF admins would enjoy defining precise rules and monitor them for effectiveness using the AF log. -- John Vandenberg _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
