First human spammer on the wiki: LindsayKudrow

First human spammer on the wiki: LindsayKudrow
by Banshaku on 2010-01-08 (#54877)

I catch it just in time and removed the link right away. Now if only human spammers add links.. The captcha as no meaning at all.

Maybe we should change the account creation with an approval system so we can remove the annoying captcha. If I remove the captcha and don't put any approval, I'm not really in the mood for cleaning links because of automated bots.

Is approval of account before allowing to post is too strict? What's people opinion about it?

by tepples on 2010-01-09 (#54927)

It's too strict if there aren't enough admins to handle approving accounts. That was one of the things that killed our last wiki.

Whenever you see a problem on a wiki running MediaWiki software, ask yourself how a larger wiki running MediaWiki software solved the same problem. Wikipedia didn't go and turn itself into Citizendium, which does require application in order to edit articles, the day the first human spammer showed up. Once an admin has identified a vandal, he can block the account and rollback all the offender's edits.

by Banshaku on 2010-01-09 (#54950)

For now it only happened once so it's not much an issue. I just need to figure out how I could remove the "offending" entry since rolling back put the offender entry in the history (duh).

I guess I was lucky to catch it since I check these days when I have time the recent changes on the wiki (I like what Ddribin is trying to do, nice try for the PPU page). There is good chance you would have been the one seeing it since you're quite active these days.

What I was thinking is which one is the lesser or 2 evil: the captcha or activating accounts. But like you said, the second one would put us back in a similar state as the older wiki if nobody can activate. BUT, if nobody can activate it, this mean nobody can take care of the wiki and we have a bigger problem: the 3 admins (and Koitsu as the last resort support) are gone. So this case is now less probable.

by tepples on 2010-01-10 (#54965)

Banshaku wrote:
For now it only happened once so it's not much an issue. I just need to figure out how I could remove the "offending" entry since rolling back put the offender entry in the history (duh).

MediaWiki leaves offending revisions in the history, but Wikipedia's robots.txt blocks search engines from seeing anything but the most recent revision of a page. Watch the location bar carefully to see when Wikipedia uses URLs with /wiki/ (robot-visible) and when it uses /w/ (robot-hidden). This should suffice for the majority of cases, such as link spam (as opposed to The Adventure of Link spam).

I can imagine a few cases where leaving a revision visible in the history would obviously open Parodius to legal liability, but MediaWiki lets an admin delete an article and undelete revisions that aren't defamatory or infringing. New versions of MediaWiki have a new feature making it easier for admins to hide a revision from the public.

And even if we were to go to manual approval for the BBS and wiki, how would a user submit an application?