Comments on: WikiSpammers are killing the wiki

By: John

John — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:46:37 +0000

that is a smart thing, I did the same. A very good way to kill spam is to make logins required. This is a huge bottleneck for webmasters searching for page rank links.

another check I am planning to create is a recent edits extension, enabling me to check new posts fast and effective.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 22:35:31 +0000

John, thanks for the tips. I’ve made logins mandatory for edits, and installed a captcha on account creation. That’s stopped the spam in its tracks, with a reasonably manageable amount of friction.

By: John

John — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:53:42 +0000

several extensions exist that limit wikispammers to do their thing:
- you have image code protection extension
- approval extension
- SPAM extension

and a lot more. see mediawiki.org

By: Caspar van der Linden

Caspar van der Linden — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

How about registration (with or whithout CAPTCHA) to keep the spambots at bay? Sure, you’ll get the manual WikiSpammers. But with good social control they’ll give up in no time.

By: D'Arcy Norman

D'Arcy Norman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Well, yeah… I could password protect the wiki. It offers both “admin” and “edit” passwords. I’ve resisted setting an “edit” password, because that is a rather unwikilike thing to do. One of the reasons for having a wiki is that anyone can edit it. The problem is that some people don’t respect the intrinsic value of this, and instead take advantage of an open GoogleBomb utility. There has to be some middle ground…