It sounds more like a worm than a bot!
It would slow the creation of users down though.
You could auto block an IP it tries to create 3 accounts in an hour with a message to contact you if this is infact a legitimate person trying to create an account.
That would stop the bot from being able to creating more than 3 accounts per ip. You can also log this information and auto generate a script to remove these accounts created from an IP that has been banned. That is assuming that these accounts are not actively changing the content of the wiki (although you can quite easily use SQL to search all tabled related to user_id to see if any changes have been made before removing a user)
Hope these ideas are useful,
Graeme
-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chris Croome Sent: 12 October 2005 10:30 To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Delete passive users ?
Hi
On Wed 12-Oct-2005 at 02:55:57AM -0600, Thompson, Graeme (AELE) wrote:
Or simply a user configurable limit of being able to only create 1 user per ip per hour.
That would stop excessive user creation into the hundreds from an IP.
Yeah, but the bot that is doing all the damage at the moment attacks from hundereds of different ip addresses so blocking / limiting stuff by ip isn't the answer to stop this attack :-(
Chris
-- Chris Croome chris@webarchitects.co.uk web design http://www.webarchitects.co.uk/ web content management http://mkdoc.com/
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