Hi Martin, thanks for your comments.
On 5 Jan 2009, at 12:05, Martin McEvoy wrote:
It looks to me like the wiki is being spammed by a bot or bots, I
have suffered problems like this.
The wiki has been spammed for a long long time. The the past, the
admins watch changes come through the #microformats IRC channel and
kill spam as it happens. That, surprisingly, has scaled OK until we
upgraded MediaWiki, which didn't work with our current IRC bot…
meaning we nolonger get a live stream of updates, and instead have to
check the Recent Changes page manually.
Restoring the IRC bot (or an XMPP+IRC version, ideally) is another
desired plugin.
I stopped it by changing the form names to to something gibberish,
nothing standard "wpTextbox1" would be come "ZifG5ut" nonsense
basically, a good Idea is to change the form names regularly, then
you can encode the submit, preview and show pages buttons in Java
script and insert them using a function. Its effective because most
people who run bots to spam wikis and blogs dont want to be bothered
creating a special script just for your site, they go for the low
hanging fruit, the easy money and in the end its nothing personal
they just move on ;-)
The problem with this solution for us is that we are keen not to
change code in the MediaWiki core, as it makes future upgrades for
security patches more difficult. The reason it took quite so much work
for me to do the last upgrade was from changes being made to core code
rather than added as extensions, so I'm loathe to do anything too
drastic. Unfortunately, MediaWiki is built in such a way that the form
mark-up is all generated out of the core, rather than templates, so we
can't adjust field names, and doing so (and adjusting the form
handling) would definitely fall into ‘drastic’ core hacking.
I've got a bit of time this week before I go back to work, so I'm
trying to take on a number of outstanding µf issues. I'll try and look
into anti-spam extensions some more.
Cheers,
Ben
Ben Ward wrote:
Hi Toby,
On 5 Jan 2009, at 01:05, Toby A Inkster wrote:
I don't know much about MediaWiki, but surely it's possible to
create a plugin which looks at edits from users with no edit
history, and blocks the edit if and only if it seems to create a
one-word paragraph at the top of the page?
Maybe. And, yes, probably. Alas, the plugins I've written for MW
are just simple parsing extensions, more complex stuff I've no idea
about the capabilities.
I've created a new issue under wiki-2-issues (http://microformats.org/wiki/wiki-2-issues#Spam
) for this one.
If we could try to collect notes of things we think should be
enhanced with MW extensions over the next week (on wiki-2-issues),
then we'll push the most urgent onto the microformats blog and
around our various networks and see if someone more experienced
with MW can help us out. Of course, if that person is already on µf-
discuss, help us Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're our only hope!
B
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--
Martin McEvoy
http://weborganics.co.uk/
"You may find it hard to swallow the notion that anything as large
and apparently inanimate as the Earth is alive."
Dr. James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia
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