[tei-council] wiki spam

[Stuart A. Yeates]

The only automated system I can think of that might work would be a
system that integrated with the TEI mailing list (which seems to have
good SPAM protection).

cheers
stuart

2011/10/1 Piotr Bański <bansp at o2.pl>:
> 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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