Hello,

so I spent the afternoon doing further research. Basically, we're up to date with our plugins and the way we fight spam.

Besides locking down the full wiki (i.e. manual account approval), there are some more options:

(1) Switching to OpenID

New wiki users would be forced to use an OpenID provider, like Yahoo or Google, to connect to the wiki. We use this at AskBot (for different reasons), but every once in a while we receive complaints that people cannot just create a local account. I think this is a valid concern, having to use an account at some other site first doesn't sound overly inviting. Plus we then would end up with a mixture of local accounts and OpenID-based ones, as existing wiki users would not be affected.

(2) Restricting external URLs to approved users

As most of the spam we see is targetted at adding links to external sites, we could limit external links to a group of users, e.g. the ones who have been autoconfirmed (i.e. active for a certain amount of days and having made several edits already). I've found one extension to do so on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:NotEvil

I am not sure how much enforcing #2 would limit legitimate users. Basically, only new users would be affected (the spam seems to happen as "fire and forget"), and it would take only a certain amount of days and edits to be autoconfirmed.

Thoughts?

Florian

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