Major spam in the Wiki

Loki · Post by **Loki** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 12:51 pm

It must be really recent, because no one seems to have noticed, but the ZDoomWiki has been hit hard by spammers. I suggest instituting CAPTCHAs at the least, if not temporarily locking all articles. Banning IPs is not going to be even remotely useful, unfortunately, as I can guarantee that they are using either anonymous proxies or TOR & Privoxy. So what should we (or, more importantly, the admins) do?

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 2:23 pm

I blocked all of the recent spammers.

One important piece of advice:

Just reverting the spam doesn't help. On several pages that were reverted I noticed that the spambot came back and reinstated its garbage. The spammers have to be blocked so notifying a Wiki admin might be a good idea.

Lamneth · Post by **Lamneth** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 3:38 pm

Is it possible at all to restrict editing abilities on the ZDoom wiki? That would be good at defending spammers, at least from more important pages.

Post by **Xaser** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 6:05 pm

How difficult would it be to add a system where an admin or mod has to manually "verify" new registrations before they're even allowed to edit the wiki. Would that potentially weed out a few 'bots or cause more trouble than it's worth?

Otherwise I can't think of a thing ('cept the general "type the number from the image" thingy that works on occasion).

Lamneth · Post by **Lamneth** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 7:58 pm

Xaser wrote:Otherwise I can't think of a thing ('cept the general "type the number from the image" thingy that works on occasion).

Ew, CAPTCHAs. I doubt the ZDoom wiki gets large numbers of registrations, so just some form of admin and moderator approval should be good enough.

Macil · Post by **Macil** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 10:03 pm

I found on a phpbb forum I have (just to test things and house certain tests), a text-based CAPTCHA with questions like "What is 1 + 1?" or "What is 5 - 2?" work well.

PaganRaven · Post by **PaganRaven** » Mon Jul 02, 2007 9:48 am

Am I too late? Noooooooooooooooo I wanna see the spam! ='(

HotWax · Post by **HotWax** » Mon Jul 02, 2007 10:04 am

I'm sure it's in the page history, unless it was deleted by an admin...

[edit] http://www.zdoom.org/wiki/index.php?tit ... on=history

Loki · Post by **Loki** » Mon Jul 02, 2007 2:31 pm

Lamneth wrote:Ew, CAPTCHAs. I doubt the ZDoom wiki gets large numbers of registrations, so just some form of admin and moderator approval should be good enough.

As annoying as CAPTCHAs may be, they are one of the only reliable ways of filtering out bots from humans. Either that, or have an approval-only editing system, but I have a feeling that would drive the Wiki admins nuts.

Lamneth · Post by **Lamneth** » Mon Jul 02, 2007 3:47 pm

Why approve every edit when you could just approve new accounts like I suggested above? Its not like the ZDoom wiki is Wikipedia, it doesn't have new accounts popping up every few seconds. The only problem is the admin couldn't tell if its a forum member or not at first glance, though. Maybe if new users had to use their forum names?