[Noisebridge-discuss] Wiki spam

[Leif Ryge]

On 11/18/2010 06:46 AM, L E wrote:
> Maybe IP ("anonymous") editing should not be permitted?  That may have already
> been discussed and nixed, more's the pity...  I mean, it's so easy to create a
> userid, which is_more_  anonymous that a raw IP address (except to admins).

Robots know how to make Mediawiki accounts. Captchas for signup would 
stop some but not all robots, as well as some but not all blind people.

The only reason that spam robots don't usually make accounts on our wiki 
is because we don't require them to.

On the other hand, yes, making an account is easy for most humans, but 
it is still enough of a hassle that requiring it prevents many casual 
edits. I have fixed numerous things on the noisebridge wiki and other 
wikis from public terminals without logging in, and in many of those 
cases I probably wouldn't have bothered if I needed to double the time 
spent just to create/forget yet another login/password.

Anonymous edits make for a much better wiki.

Does anyone have opinions or experience regarding Akismet?

Disabling page creation or edits-with-links for anonymous users is still 
fail for the above reasons, imho.

~leif