wiki.freeculture.org is inundated with spam

Bug #775218 reported by Nelson Pavlosky
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Web Team projects
Triaged
High
Unassigned

Bug Description

The spam on our wiki is completely out of control. Just look at the recent changes and you'll see a few dozen spambot edits every day. I spent several hours one day banning robots and deleting the spam pages they created, and it didn't make so much as a dent in the spam... I infer from this that the bots are probably not coming from the same IP, otherwise my aggressive banning would have slowed them down.

I propose using a captcha to prevent bots from creating accounts, or simply closing account creation until we have a spam solution that works. I still like Bad Behavior but I know Asheesh hates it.

UPDATE: I tried to prevent account creation by editing /home/freecult/domains/wiki.freeculture.org/config/LocalSettings.php according to the directions found at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access#Restrict_account_creation ... this had no effect. I don't understand why account creation has not been disabled. I left my changes to LocalSettings.php in place since they are not having any effect, comment them out if you feel like it.

Also, it turns out that we do have reCaptcha installed on our wiki to prevent spambot account creation, but clearly it is not stopping the spambots. Is it broken, or have the bots just gotten smart enough to solve recaptcha?

Revision history for this message
Nelson Pavlosky (nelson-freeculture) wrote :

A typical spambot-created page looks like:

http://wiki.freeculture.org/Baby_Jogger_City_Single_Stroller

Changed in web:
importance: Undecided → High
Alec Story (astory)
Changed in web:
status: New → Confirmed
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Alec Story (astory) wrote :

With the no-new-accounts thing, I'm marking this as triaged.

Changed in web:
status: Confirmed → Triaged
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