[Noisebridge-discuss] Wiki spam

[Andy Isaacson]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 01:55:00PM -0800, Leif Ryge wrote:
> 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.

In fact, looking at our account creation logs it's pretty clear there
already are a lot of robot accounts.

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

That, and we require SSL so there's a lot of lower-hanging fruit out
there; as other wikis establish antispam measures we'll become more of a
target.

> 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.

I agree, in the long term we should reenable all edit features for
non-logged-in users; the current set of restrictions (no new pages by
non-logged-in users) is strictly to make my life easier for the next 24
hours.

I'm also not able to sign up for managing a captcha system; outsourcing
it to someone else is possible, but I'd want some way to be confident
that they won't suddenly go away or make other things suck.

-andy