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

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 07/30/2012 05:35 PM, Henk-Jan van Tuyl wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:03:49 +0200, Henk-Jan van Tuyl <hjgtuyl at chello.nl>  
> wrote:
> 
>>
>> I am willing to do administrator tasks.
>>
>>> 4. ReCAPTCHA enabled for 'edits adding new, unrecognized external
>>> links' - which is all of the spam.
>>
>> This is already enabled.
> 
> The HaskellWiki is still flooded with spam; we should take some measure to  
> reduce the stream severely. Most spam seems to be created  
> (semi-)automated; the pages do not contain links, the usernames end with  
> two digits, most of the time. Some cures I have thought up:
> 

There are two (easy) things that will make a huge dent in the automated
stuff.

  1. Add a fake field, hidden through CSS, labeled something like "You
     must leave this field blank to submit the form" (for non-visual
     browsers). Put it on every page with a submit button. If it isn't
     empty, don't process the submission. You can give it a /name/ that
     sounds tempting, though.

  2. Force previews. If the bots are targeted at your wiki software and
     you modify it to preview all submissions, the bots will stop
     working.