Surely you didn't expect it would be easy. There is a lot of effort expended to generate SPAM because it is economically rewarded. I think it would be fair to guess that whoever is generating this batch has bots that are capable of verifying their email addresses or some underpaid folks in some low labor cost country are actually paid to establish the user and verify the address. From there, a bot can easily take over.
>From reading the pages referenced in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist (such as http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist ), we have the ability to add domain names to a local blacklist, "Spam that only affects a single project should go to that project's local blacklist." and suggest additions to MediaWiki's list. It would seem to me that is the next step. It WILL take a while for the local list to become large enough to slow the additions. 2011/5/31 Ryan Rix - r...@n.rix.si: > Hi, > > http://teachingopensource.org/index.php?title=Tudor_Hotel_Cape_Town&action=history > > But wait, there's more! > http://teachingopensource.org/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&limit=250&hidemyself=1 > Skimming through my deleting of spam pages, you see a lot more spam being > added. > > Well, now what? > > r > > On Wed 25 May 2011 16:21:36 Ryan Rix wrote: >> Heya everyone, >> >> I just finished enacting more antispam measures on tos.o. This is >> important for anyone wishing to edit the wiki, as it may force you to do >> some work (email verification). >> >> == Email verification == >> >> I have made it so that only users who have verified an email address are >> allowed to edit the Wiki now. When you register, you have the chance to >> verify an email address, but it's not required, so I imagine quite a few >> users did not do so. :) They can no longer edit the wiki. It's easy to >> verify email addresses though. >> >> 1) log in >> 2) open http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Special:Preferences >> 3) go down to == E-Mail options == >> 4) tell it to send you an email confirmation >> 5) Click the link in the mail that it sends you >> >> All done, and you can edit again. >> >> == Spam Blacklist == >> I've enabled the SpamBlacklist plugin, which checks edits against a >> blacklist of regularexpressions, currently being hosted by Wikipedia >> (any site can have their own, piggybacking WP was just the easiest). If >> one of your edits matches a regex on >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist it will be denied. >> If it's a legitimate edit, and is getting a false positive, let one of >> the infrastructure people know. >> >> Hopefully these two measures will prevent the vast majority of the spam >> problems we have been facing. I'm going to do a cursory look through the >> Main namespace and clean out any spam tonight, and some time in the next >> week or so purge spamming users. >> >> Thanks everyone! > -- > Ryan Rix -- http://rix.si > == OpenSource.com: Where Open Source Happens! == > > _______________________________________________ > tos mailing list > tos@teachingopensource.org > http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos > > _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
