[Mediawiki-l] Anti-spam help

Tue Dec 20 04:37:31 UTC 2005

On Mon, 19 Dec 2005, Steven Clift wrote:

> E-Democracy.Org is using MediaWiki for various local citizen guides and
> non-partisan election information directories:
> http://e-democracy.org/wiki
>
> As you can tell we are suffering from spammers.
> http://www.e-democracy.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges
>
> As an all volunteer-based group, we are looking for help to defend our
> ability to use MediaWiki.
>
> What are the main things we need in place to still allow open edits, but
> to reduce wiki spam?
> 
> Is there any kind of add-on that would require someone to enter a code
> from a graphic to save or a way to ban HTML or the hide the crap "div"
> code?

The SpamBlacklist extension seems to work pretty well against spammers 
who add advertising links (with the intent of improving their Google 
ranking I suppose).

There might be other extensions which use "soft" rules to prevent 
large-scale damages (force a certain delay between 2 edits by the same 
user, forbid removal of too much stuff from different pages in the same 
time interval, ...)

In addition you should absolutely make frequent backups of your MySQL 
database so that large-scale damages could be repaired by restoring the 
last sane copy of the database.

Martin

--
Martin Jambon, PhD
http://martin.jambon.free.fr

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