The login with captchas requirement sounds like the best possibility for
remedying this. It forces the person to remain in the loop and waste
their time, although if they're willing to make a bot to vandalize
wikipedia, they obviously have time to waste.
Neil Harris wrote:
Brian wrote:
I came across what most likely was a vandal bot
using IPs on the
range 152.163.100.*, and some other IPs I don't remember, creating a
couple dozen articles with random titles and the same block of
nonsense in the body. They would appear 3 or 4 at a time, each on a
different IP. I've been told this is an AOL range, and that if it's a
bot, that's bad. So, just letting you all know....
--brian0918
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Wikipedia e-mail: AOL vandalbot
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 09:26:18 GMT
From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
To: Brian0918 <brian0918(a)gmail.com>
(I also put this on your talk page.)
Please hop on IRC and let the devs on #wikimedia-tech know straight
away - vandalbots coming from AOL is a doomsday scenario, owing to
their stupidly broad proxy network, and Tim Starling really wants to
know about this stuff if it springs up. Try to keep it to as small
ranges of AOL as possible, though Tim says he'd happily block the
whole ISP if the alternative is making the wiki read-only. Drop a
line to Wikitech-L as well (you have to subscribe first), detailing
what makes you think it's a vandalbot and so on, best detail
possible. (If it turns out not to have been a bot, blame me ;-) I'd
rather you raised an unnecessary alarm than fail to raise a necessary
one.)
- d.
There really is no excuse for AOL not to tag their user proxy accesses
with some kind of token that can be used for abuse complants.
The simplest way round this problem would be to "greylist" AOL, by
preventing anon editors from editing from AOL proxy address space.
AOL currently has roughly 22% of the U.S. ISP market [source:
http://www.isp-planet.com/research/rankings/usa.html]. Applying this
restriction would thus have no effect on 78% of potential anon
Wikipedia editors, and might even _increase_ the overall quality level
of Wikipedia anon contributions.
Any legitimate AOL contributor need only create an account to be able
to edit, an this could be made easy for them by diverting the "edit
this page" link for anons to a login page which said:
"Because of problems with vandalism by some AOL users, you will need
to register a username before editing. Creating a Wikipedia username
is free, and has many benefits... &c. &c."
Of course, this would not stop AOL-hosted vandalbots from repeatedly
registering accounts in order to edit, but it would be possible to
limit this by throttling the rate of new account registrations from
AOL IPs in the usual way, as well as other possible anti-vandalbot
measures such as requiring the use of CAPTCHAs (with an E-mail
automation alternative for the disabled) for AOL account registrations.
-- Neil
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