Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version , i see that in addition to ConfirmEdit, they have a number of anti-spam measures installed. One that caught my eye specifically, is TorBlock, which makes that no users of anonymous proxies can edit the wiki. Spammers often use these anonymizers to hide their identity, and although this will unfortunately also block a small percentage of bonafide users who use Tor (or another anonymizer) from editing the wiki, this, in combination with a captcha, may also prove to be an effective tool to combat spam.
@M.E. Verhagen: I am with Justin on this, we want to put up as few barriers as possible for people to register and edit the wiki. We want as many people as possible to add what they know, to correct errors and omissions, making new members wait until one of the sysops finds the time to enable their account, will make these people lose interest very fast. What we do want is to thwart automated processes from signing up, and circumvent our measures to prevent this. For that reason, i really do like Michelle Argus' suggestion to make a minor change that will throw a bot off, but which will not hinder real persons from signing up and/or posting. @Bo, i kind of like the idea, and i definitely think that it would work for a grid-specific wiki, like the OSGrid wiki, or the Inworldz wiki. However, the OpenSim wiki would have to be able to send a message to every grid, including those that are not listed anywhere. You could make a custom signup form, asking for avatar name, grid (in a freeform textbox), etc. But that may in turn lead to an even worse vulnerability. Imagine the following scenario: This guy called Bo bumped into my avatar and did not apologize, and i want to take revenge. So i write some script that will fill out his avatar name and grid into our shiny new form. You would then get bombarded by a massive number of requests to confirm your identity, ruining your fun of being in-world. And we don't want to be responsible for that either. It would turn us from target for spam, into a griefing tool. And i would much rather be a target than a tool :-) _______________________________________________ Opensim-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
