OK. Yesterday I was looking with a few other ENWP people at what I think was a series of edits by either a vandal bot or an inadequately designed and unapproved good faith bot. I read that it made approximately 500 edits before someone who knew enough about ENWP saw what was happening and did something about it. I don't know how many problematic bots we have, in addition to vandal bots, but I am confident that they drain a nontrivial amount of time from stewards, admins, and patrollers.
I don't know how much of a priority WMF places on detecting and stopping unwelcome bots, but I think that the question of how to decrease the numbers and effectiveness of unwelcome bots would be a good topic for WMF to research. Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) On Sat, Feb 9, 2019 at 9:24 PM Gergo Tisza <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 6:20 PM Pine W <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I don't know how practical it would be to implement an approach like this > > in the Wikiverse, and whether licensing proprietary technology would be > > required. > > > > They are talking about Polyform [1], a reverse proxy that filters traffic > with a combination of browser fingerprinting, behavior analysis and proof > of work. > Proof of work is not really useful unless you have huge levels of bot > traffic from a single bot operator (also it means locking out users with no > Javascript); browser and behavior analysis very likely cannot be outsourced > to a third party for privacy reasons. Maybe we could do it ourselves > (although it would still bring up interesting questions privacy-wise) but > it would be a huge undertaking. > > > [1] https://www.kasada.io/product/ > _______________________________________________ > 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
