For purposes of account creation, I think of spambots and vandalbots as being in the same.
If our CAPTCHAs are deterring a significant percentage of humans while allowing a significant percentage of bots through, we should change something. Pine On Nov 9, 2014 4:38 PM, "Platonides" <[email protected]> wrote: > On 09/11/14 17:19, Marc A. Pelletier wrote: > >> On 11/09/2014 10:20 AM, Brian Wolff wrote: >> >>> Does anyone have any attack scenario that is remotely plausible which >>> requiring a verified email would prevent? >>> >> >> Spambots (of which there are multitude, and that hammer any mediawiki >> site constantly) have gotten pretty good at bypassing captchas but have >> yet to respond properly to email loops (and that's a more complicated >> obstacle than first appears; throwaway accounts are cheap but any >> process that requires a delay - however small - means that spambot must >> now maintain state and interact rather than fire-and-forget). >> > > We have so far talked about spambots, but what about *vandals*? > > We have a whole class of users interested in damaging/manipulating our > projects. Some of them just want to create problems, while others have an > agenda (eg. SEO). A number of them know how to program (even though they > would probably not create a neural network to OCR our captcha!) > > Removing the captcha also lowers the bar for an account creator bot, > becoming very easy. > > Given that a hundred of dormant wikipedia accounts are valuable, will > $wgAccountCreationThrottle be enough to deter them? Is changing the IP > every 6 accounts hard enough? > > (Actually, you would also need not to raise sysop suspicions from the > names you generate, but given the weird names people is already using...) > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
