[Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] Spam on the Haskell wiki

[Alexander Solla]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Henk-Jan van Tuyl <hjgtuyl at chello.nl>wrote:
>
>
>  - Verify new wiki accounts, before granting them rights,
>    based on e-mails in the Haskell mailing lists
>    (or subscription of a Haskell mailing list)


This is a nice idea, but I think it will end up moving spam onto the
mailing lists.  There is hardly any policy in place to keep people out of
the mailing lists.  Mailing list spam is attractive to spammers, since it
all gets mirrored to archive sites all over the place.

Not to volunteer others, but how feasible would it be to require
credentials from Haskellers.org?


>  - Let new users only change pages, not create new pages
>

This is good for stopping the creation of walled gardens full of spam.  But
it won't stop "vandalism" spam, where somebody goes to a page that isn't
accessed much and changes it.

Does anybody have statistics about how often pages are edited/added?  If
the numbers aren't too big, I'd volunteer to "moderate" insofar as scanning
new edits/adds for spam.  Maybe this role should just forward articles with
spam on them to a "real" moderator to roll-back.  We could even have a
"report spam" button on each page, and if enough users click on it (for a
given revision), the revision gets forwarded to a moderator.


>  - Block creation of usernames
>     o ending with two or more digits
>     o with more than one x or q
>     o starting with "buy"
>     o longer than 20 characters
>     o with more than 4 consonants in a row
>

I don't see this providing any security against spam, and I'm thinking it
will take longer to implement than it will take for a spammer to fix his
scripts in response.


>  - Block creation of pages with words in a certain list
>    (Coach, Vuitton, Chanel, handbags, purses, outlet, luggage, "Nike Air
> Jordan")
>

 Same.
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