Re: Spam on the wiki

On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 4:11 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> writes:
> > So they break the captcha in seconds. I'm more and more thinking andres'
> > idea that it's actually farmed out to people and not just bots...
>
> Yeah, it's sounding a lot like manual creation of the accounts and then
> bots doing the actual spamming.
>

Yup.

> > My suggestion is we make all edits on the wiki moderated, if that's at
> all
> > possible. It's AFAIK the only service where we allow people to post
> things
> > with no moderation on the content today, and clearly that's not working.
>
> Sigh. That's pretty ugly, though maybe it will work if you can set it up
> so that known members of the community can bypass the moderation. The
> bulk of the legitimate edits probably come from a fairly small number of
> people.
>

Yeah. I have no idea how mediawiki actually works with those things, but
I'm not sure what else we can do. It's been suggested to have a cooling-off
period for new accounts, but how long should that be... I guess we could
have a 2-4 week cooling off period and then some way to bypass it by
contacting someone manually, but who's going to deal with those approvals?

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/