On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 10:04 -0500, Chuck wrote:
My wikis are getting spammed with short text strings like "copasnotra" and "romonboel". Based on my limited understanding of spambots, it seems like the bots are making these changes as a prelude to doing something else
What they're doing is polluting the database of heuristics, by inserting either common or nonsense words. For example, if (prior to this tactic), the amount of "spammy" words in the table (Viagra, etc.) was 80% of the total number of words, they fill the database with common, nonsense words to get the quality of the filter to lower itself enough to let the spammy words back through, by pushing them down below that threshold.
I've seen this used for years while using dspam, but thankfully for us, dspam has kept us 100% spam-free for years. Not a single spam email or other garbage in any user's mailbox going on years, with only very minimal false-positives.
Perhaps a look at their methods, and rolling those in to mediawiki's anti-spammy comment approach might be worthwhile?