major wiki-spam alert !

[Sy]

I think the best all-around method would be captcha and forced logins.
 However, wikipedia doesn't have a captcha login system that I know
of.

I would pull my fingernails out before using a captcha system for
every edit.  I sometimes edit a page dozens of times before I'm happy
with it.

Your mention of IP blocking circumvention is a good point.  With that
in mind, and considering how easy it is to register a user, I see no
proper long-term solution.  Email validation would also help a little,
but is also spammer-scriptable.

* Forced logins = script a login bot
** User banning = make a new user
* Email validation for new users (not yet possible) = script a reply bot
* IP blocking = circumvention
* Use google redirect for all links = makes me twitch, doesn't stop
spamming but only stops their benefit through google.

So far the only real solution is to keep rolling back and banning.

I swear, I'd love to design a distributed bot which auto-spams
multiple pages from multiple IPs faster than humans can rollback. 
Then maybe wiki security would be forced to grow up.



On 7/20/05, J. Qiang Li <shijialee-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> --- Sy <sy1235-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
> I started to see the porn spambot in action since July 12. ruby on rails' wiki users are busying
> rolling back their wikipages.  http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/recently_revised/
> 
> > Ok, so we do have one voice voting for requiring usernames.  If a few
> > other people speak up, this is a setting that can be made mandatory
> > quite easily..  Assuming I can remember how to ssh in.  ;)
> 
> that will die down the spam and be okay for now (I hope). but what if the spammer have a robot
> register accounts and defacing wiki page too ?
> 
> > Regarding the IP blocking techniques
> 
> It's not really useful as I have seen spammer using proxy to bypass this.
> 
> I really love to see the wiki integrated with CAPTCHA (ask user to key in the symbols in the pic
> before posting). This will stop the spambot and they are the biggest thread to wiki pages. there
> are many implementation in various languages for this technique.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha
> 
> 
> James.Q.L
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml