On Wednesday, August 02, 2006 7:47 AM Antoine Hersen wrote: > Thank you very much for fighting spam for us.
Thanks for the encouragement to continue the fight against these web site abusers. > I like to point how important it is not only because it is > annoying but also because it will make the axiom web page a > so called "farm link" meaning loosing rating or not even showing > up in Google and co. Yes you are right, this could happen if we let too much spam accumulate. The spam attach is still continuing at the rate of more than 60 attempts per minute. Uncaught spam arriving at this rate could easily overwhelm our server and cause it to fail. My first attempt at a remedy for this problem was to configure the wiki to require user preferences to be set before permitting comments and then left the ban on http external links. This works but unfortunately the spam robots are smarter than I thought and actually do set the cookies necessary to indicate valid preferences. So when I tried it a few hours ago, we got another burst of spam that got through and ultimately (partly my fault) it resulted in having to reboot the axiom-developer.org server. My second attempt to control this threat is to continue the ban on http external links for unauthenticated (i.e. non Zope) users. This is the way the ban was originally supposed to work - users who have a specially assigned user id - over and above that set in their preferences - are allowed to ignore the ban. If they are editing a page or adding a comment that contains banned content, then they will be prompted to enter their user id and password. If it is valid, the edit will be allowed to continue. If not, then they (and all those damned robots!) will receive a 401 Unauthorized return code. This seems to be working now. Would those of you who have the Zope user accounts, i.e. Ralf, Marten, and Bob McElrath, please try this and confirm that it is working the way it is supposed to. It might be possible to lift the ban on external links at some point in the future if these spam attacks stop, but in the mean time, if you are an Axiom developer or Axiom user and you want to be able to freely edit and post comments to the Axiom Wiki, please contact me by email and I will provide you with a Zope user id. If you would like just to make one or two simple pages and you get caught by this ban, maybe the best approach would be for you to send your changes to one someone who already has a Zope user id. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
