On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 6:09 PM, Daniel Friesen daniel@nadir-seen-fire.com wrote:
On Fri, 24 May 2013 13:41:04 -0700, Al Johnson alj62888@yahoo.com wrote:
Maybe mediawiki sites can unite to keep a global list of these IP's and block them as soon as they are submitted. Each mediawiki site can auto-submit a spammer IP as soon as it's discovered to the global list. What are the problems with this idea?
Al
IP blocking simply doesn't work. It's like playing whack-a-mole against a billion moles (or trillions on trillions once IPv6 really takes off). There are too many open proxies, botnet machines, etc... and many of them are either also addresses used by real editors, NAT addresses with editors on them, or dynamic IPs that will soon be forced on a non-spammer while the spammer gets an unblocked IP.
From what I've seen, it's probably the least time-effective technique
for preventing spam, but it is effective against naive vandals like we see on en.wikipedia.org. It may be enough to get a spammer to move on to easier targets. I'd be interested in hearing if any smaller wikis have tried this and found it to work or not work.
The proper way to deal with this spam is not by IP but by content. We need some people who are knowledgeable about matching spam by training programs with spam and non-spam. That's the kind of central database that would be useful. An extension that sends spam (and after awhile things marked non-spam) to a central database. A community on that database that vets valid and invalid submissions. And eventually a mode for that extension that will start using information generated from that data to start filtering out spam edits.
I've actually already thought about this and thought about how to make it friendly to users when their edits accidentally end up considered spam: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/Anti-spam_system
We have a gsoc proposal from Anubhav, who wants to create a bayesan filter: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Anubhav_iitr/Bayesan_spam_filter
The primary target for that project is smaller wikis, so I'm sure he would appreciate input and feedback on that project if it gets accepted.
-- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]
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