After trying various ways to stop spam such as captchas, abuse filters, blacklists and whitelists. Some of which were intrusive, while others slowed the wiki down. I've now had success with a mini Extension:ConfirmAccount. Setting this up is explained at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmAccount#Minimal_settings

Now instead any potential editor has to be approved manually, it only takes a moment if an admin is watching the site. That is they request an account by confirming their email address, providing a user name and a short message to prove they're not a bot.

Rob

It's never a good idea to use the same questions everyone else does. If every site uses a different set of questions, spammers have to crack them one by one. Using a solution somebody posted on the internet is an invitation for spammers to crack it.

Am 12.09.2014 01:06, schrieb chris tharp:

ps. -- Just for general info someone has cracked the dynamic questions for ConfirmEdit extension published here:

http://thingelstad.com/stopping-mediawiki-spam-with-dynamic-questy-captchas/

I've used the questions for months and had the joy of zero spam, but unfortunately the system has been cracked. I'm throwing it out there in case someone had became like me and stopped checking for spam on a regular basis. It makes for a very, very unhappy day when you find on the order of 1000 spam accounts.