On 02/27/2012 02:17 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:57:14 +0000 > From: Daniel Barrett <[email protected]> > To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list > <[email protected]> > Subject: [Mediawiki-l] CAPTCHA recommendation for account-creation > bots? > Message-ID: > <68cf225601adf74ba1f8a2511535f85d0a9d2...@wndmail02.vistaprint.net> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > Spam bots are creating accounts on my music wiki > (http://www.blazemonger.com/GG/Special:RecentChanges). What is the best > extension to prevent this? I installed ConfirmEdit and tried the default > CAPTCHA (SimpleCAPTCHA) but it didn't stop the bots. Before I experiment > with the many other options, I thought I'd ask what people recommend. > > Fortunately the bots can't edit articles, just create useless accounts. > > Thanks, > DanB
I'll take this opportunity to point out that Dan's not the only one. People who run MediaWiki instances come into IRC (#mediawiki) every day asking for help fighting spam and vandalism. Some emails that have come my way (reprinted with permission): Jason Vertrees wrote: > HI Sumana, > > After opening up my wiki for free registration, I immediately got > three spam accounts. One turned into real spam being injected into and > then cleaned from the wiki. None of the methods aside from preventing > self-registration seem to work against spam. Unfortunately, this also > prevents growth. > > I read the links you provided--do you have anything else more proactive? > > Thanks, > > -- Jason Sergey Chernyshev wrote: "Do you by any chance know a reliable way to combat spam? I'm tired of the hordes of spammers attacking my MW projects.... Unfortunately, I'm well aware of current anti-spam features and none of them simplify the spam combat to the level similar to WordPress, for example." (http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/) Anne Gray wrote of sfeditorwatch.com and sfartistwatch.com, which have Google Analytics, ReCaptcha and Bad Behavior installed: > > Thank you for offering to help try to figure out what's gone wrong > with sfeditorwatch.com and sfartistwatch.com. Cheryl's email reminds > me that activity on the sf editors wiki was really picking up for a > while, the year before it started getting attention from spambots. > Once I started having to protect pages to keep from losing content and > the wiki started being full of spam, participation declined sharply. > It rapidly hit the point where I as an administrator couldn't possibly > hope to keep up. Then reCaptcha broke and people *couldn't* edit > their own pages. At this point, I'm pretty sure bots are almost the > only thing active there.... [snip] > Sfartistwatch never really took off partly, I think, because it's > really non-obvious how to post images (I still have never learned). > And I'm worried that if we turn it on, it will get hit by the kind of > spammers that are posting hundreds of spam images to the Carl Brandon > society wiki... > > I don't know enough to set up bots to patrol, to set up notifications > so that I as the administrator can "watch" all the pages, or to use > scripts or whatever to nuke the massive amounts of spam pages that are > created regularly. Bots are clearly getting past recaptcha to > register users (they're doing that on the carl brandon wiki, too), and > the "Random page" button is totally useless for a visitor who is > actually interested in the topic of the wiki (is there a way to > reprogram that, so it only selects a random page that has a category, > at least? (it would be sooo nice, when you Block a user for spam or > vandalism, for the following page to list pages that user created, > with checkboxes beside them, and provide the option to select all of > them at once and delete them. Even better if it gave the option of > automatically protecting against future re-creation of those spam > pages.)... Most of these administrators are smart people who just need a little help fighting the bots. It sounds like the recommendations from this group so far are: * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:QuestyCaptcha , a plugin for the ConfirmEdit extension * http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SimpleAntiSpam so I've added those to these help pages: * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-spam_features * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_vandalism and welcome additional improvements to those docs, especially if recommendations that are in there right now are no longer worthy of recommendation. Also, anyone want to take a crack at cleaning out what's no longer applicable in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Spam_Filter so I can suggest it as a project for contributors? -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
