Wiki War

[No one in particular]

It's been going on for a few months now, but the ErfWiki is just getting wave after wave of spammers, and we could use some support over there. Like, of the last 500 edits, about 321 of them are one admin deleting pages and dropping the banhammer. I think Miment's already asked about a security captcha or something, but even just promoting another admin would be a great help.

On the upside, we did get this from it: http://www.erfworld.com/wiki/index.php/ ... of_Erfwiki

[charles]

Heh, I enjoyed writing "The Spamming of Erfwiki" page. Fun times.

But yeah... Months and MONTHS of non-stop spamming have taken their toll on the wiki community I think. +9001 Internet points to Miment for persistence in battling the problem.

View our pain

[charles]

DAMN!

Major issues in the Wiki now. Looks like they're deleting the content of pages and replacing it with rubish. In some cases they're only deleting portions so its a little hard to spot.

Desperately need anti-bot measures put in place.

[WaterMonkey314]

Could you maybe disable all edits to the wiki and have users PM edits to Miment or some other admin to add them personally?

Anyway, I'd like to help if I can - just let me know what you'd like me to do.

[No one in particular]

Well, while that might stop the spamming, it would kind of destroy the community-created nature of the wiki. : /

Also, you know, it'd be putting a lot of work on the few admins over there.

Anyway, if you want to chip in for now, feel free to replace the content of the spam pages with [[category:spammer]], and slap that on the talk page of the user who created it. That way, instead of having to go through the recent changes page, we can just work from the category page.

Many thanks!

[Gez]

As long as the site admins won't install extensions to prevent known spammer IPs from even reaching the wiki, this will continue. It's a battle of automated bots and scripts vs. puny humans. Look at the Terminator movies to see how well the fleshbags fare in such situations.

Even if you tirelessly revert their edits, they will still pollute the revision history (and the database which keeps each version of the page forever). It doesn't cost them anything, the attack scripts are run from zombified computers part of a botnet; not from the spammers' own machines. They simply have no reason to ever stop. You've got to block them, it's the only way to win. Asking users to flag and revert spamming is at best a temporary solution.

I really recommend using the extension that queries StopForumSpam, BotScout, ProjectHoneypot and similar databases before letting anything register an account or edit a page anonymously. It's more reliable than CAPTCHAs which are less and less effective nowadays unless you make a custom one, since all the big ones have had problem-solving programs written to crack them.

[WaterMonkey314]

What I've noticed is that I get hit with a weak CAPTCHA when trying to restore a vandalized page, and it delays me more than it does the spammers!!!

Since a CAPTCHA already gets displayed, can't we upgrade it to something tougher?

[WaterMonkey314]

spam links

Oh, the irony of a spammer spamming the "Wiki War" thread!

[charles]

I've got it! Use Kitten Auth. Normally it shows a bunch of pictures of different animals and asks you to select which one is the kitten, but you can customise it.

So you just load a heap of images of erfworld characters, particularly Wanda, and ask people to select the picture of Wanda. Should stop even the human opperators unless they actually know the comic, and its simple enough to switch to a different erfworld character like Ansom if they start to figure it out. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:KittenAuth

[charles]

Woohoo!!!

KittenAuth is customised and appears to be working.

25 images. 5 x Parson, 5 x Wanda, 5 x Ansom, 5 x Stanley and 5 x Jillian

Currently we have to select Parson. But even if the bots decide to spend the time to figure it out, all we do is switch to one of the other characters and they've suddenly got to invest the time to figure it out all over again.

Greak work harknell!!!

[Mal]

I'm keeping on top of deleting spam and blocking spammers that pop up from now on, so with luck, most of the woes should be done with