[Haskell] Spam on HaskellWiki

[Henk-Jan van Tuyl]

On Sat, 13 Dec 2008 12:10:10 +0100, Ashley Yakeley <ashley at semantic.org>  
wrote:

> This is beginning to annoy people. Actually, someone registered several  
> thousand accounts (of the form XxxxxXxxxx), though almost all of them  
> have not been used. The others have been used to add spam.
>
> I can block user accounts and IP addresses, and I can grant this  
> privilege to others on whatever basis the Haskell community think  
> appropriate.
>
> I have CheckUser installed (allows me to find the IP addresses of a  
> given user, and find edits from a particular IP address), and this is  
> also a grantable privilege. However, given that the spam is coming from  
> quite a number of IP addresses, I suspect there is some kind of botnet  
> involved.
>
> There is a tool called "rollback" that allows one-click revert of one or  
> more sequential edits from the same user, which makes reverting spam a  
> one-click-per-page operation. Again, this is a grantable privilege and  
> in any case relatively harmless. However, it is only available with  
> MediaWiki 1.9 and later, and HaskellWiki is running MediaWiki 1.5.4, so  
> this means doing an upgrade. The current stable release is 1.13.2.
>

I think it would be even better when the site is protected with captchas  
[1], like wipipedia is. http://captchas.net/ provides a free captcha  
service. It is too easy to create a new user account and to edit pages by  
means of a forum spambot [2].

-- 
Regards,
Henk-Jan van Tuyl


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spambot#Forum_spambots

--
http://functor.bamikanarie.com
http://Van.Tuyl.eu/
--