[tei-council] wiki spam

[Piotr Bański]

Hi James,

Thing is that 15:10000 offers no tradeoff (yeah, it's exaggerated, but
still). The only real users we get are users who actively want to
contribute, very often in their own (academic or just professional)
interest. For these users, sending a sentence explaining who they are
and waiting for approval even a day (I bet often just minutes -- Syd
could testify how fast I subscribe people to the SIG list), is not a
problem, and certainly not a serious barrier.

We use MediaWiki software, the most common wiki software, against which
spambots are trained. They don't come here because we're TEI, they come
here because it's MediaWiki with relatively good positioning (not even
sure if the latter counts -- bots are cheap, Amazon Turk captcha
breakers are cheap as well, you can go en masse, irrespective of the
ranking).

Of the other options that you mention, I'm afraid most/all have been
compromised by spammers. If captcha is, then what else can you do.

Best,

  P.


On 01/10/11 00:15, James Cummings wrote:
> 
> Hi Piotr,
> 
> I understand the pain here.  It is a tradeoff between keeping the 
> spammers out and free and easy access to the wiki.  Needing manual 
> approval is certainly adding a barrier to use of the wiki, and 
> potentially makes more work. (Though yes, it might be less work than 
> blocking and rolling back spam.)
> 
> Can you think of other automate or configuration settings which might 
> allow us to keep ease of registration by non-spamming humans but don't 
> involve manual moderation of registrations?  I guess what I'm asking is 
> what other options are there?
> 
> -James
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 30/09/11 21:25, Piotr Bański wrote:
>> One more thing: the ratio of real new users to fake new users of the TEI
>> wiki can easily be around 0.015 : 10. One new real user every two months
>> vs. 10 spambots.
>>
>> Do have a look:
>>
>> http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=block
>>
>> Would the Council agree to change the wiki registration flow from
>> "captcha'd" to "by approval"?
>>
>> best,
>>
>>    Piotr
>>
> 
> 


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