Karl Schmidt wrote:
Having trouble with bots placing gibberish on our
site. I first want to understand the why?
It could be :
* They testing or trying to get setup to spam search engine indexes?
* They are measuring the time to rollback?
* Spy code words - pass information anonymously without traceability?
* Want to destroy search engine ranking?
* ??
Anyone have a clear understanding of this?
I've read some interesting theories and have a few of my own, but I'm
more interested in stopping spam.
The gibberish spammer can be stopped by adding a line to your
LocalSettings.php file. The line changes your site configuration so that
people have to be registered users to edit or create new pages.
Unfortunately, I've lost the location of this page and the information.
It's on the MediaWiki support site, but the anti-spam pages are poorly
organized and I only found this page by accident. Perhaps somebody can
provide the URL to the page I'm thinking about.
MediaWiki could improve its anti-spam pages by creating a new page that
lists the kind of attacks that MediaWiki administrators are running into.
I had hoped that this fix would also stop the spambot which is creating
dummy user accounts with fake Russian email addresses. I stopped the
gibberish, but not the fake Russian accounts.
Chuck Munson
Infoshop.org
Wikis=>
OpenWiki (anarchist encyclopedia and alternative to Wikipedia)
http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Science Fiction & Fantasy wiki
http://www.infoshop.org/sf/index.php/Main_Page
The Matrix: Anti-Capitalist Wiki
http://www.infoshop.org/octo/matrix/index.php/Main_Page
Infoshop Library
http://infoshop.org/library/