Wow. I am getting clobbered, or was. I shut down the new account system that was open to the public and set it to be by e-mail confirmation, then disabled e-mail for a while.. I then used the deletUnusedAccounts.php a couple of times and it deleted 17860 of the spammers. But they are a persistant lot and some of them actually did manage to get pages up and running, actually hundreds or maybe thousands of them. The challenge is "How do I get rid of them?", & doing it one at a time is useless. How to keep them at bay. I would appreciate any tips regarding this. expecially actual mediawiki settings that get rid of them. I need to know if there is any way to 'delete' them using a list of the user:names seems there should be a simple way to do this, but I've had no luck so far. Thanks! John
Hi John,
I am helping the document foundation with spam issues, and they report a drastic drop of registrations with questy which is really good. I am currently working on being able to have localized questions for the said project. I am not sure how to exactly answer your question though.
My wiki though public does not accept registrations at all. I am the only one with an account.
On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 10:16 PM, John W. Foster jfoster81747@gmail.comwrote:
Wow. I am getting clobbered, or was. I shut down the new account system that was open to the public and set it to be by e-mail confirmation, then disabled e-mail for a while.. I then used the deletUnusedAccounts.php a couple of times and it deleted 17860 of the spammers. But they are a persistant lot and some of them actually did manage to get pages up and running, actually hundreds or maybe thousands of them. The challenge is "How do I get rid of them?", & doing it one at a time is useless. How to keep them at bay. I would appreciate any tips regarding this. expecially actual mediawiki settings that get rid of them. I need to know if there is any way to 'delete' them using a list of the user:names seems there should be a simple way to do this, but I've had no luck so far. Thanks! John
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
Why you need to delete those spammer accounts? I thought to ban them with their IP address is enough unless others from the same IP address want to contribute to your wiki.
Actually at that time when my wiki was under spamming, I accidentally blocked two IP addresses, and suddenly...... No more spammers :D or at least not that more. I don't think your wiki would have so much people registering to manually, so that spamming must be done with a program which came from one or several IPs.
Moreover, I tried to use ReCaptcha from Extension: ConfirmEdithttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEditto protect my wiki from spammers, but still failed. I was told that some of the spamming accounts are registered manually and then spammed automatically. Why not ask everyone with edits less than 3 or 5 to do ReCaptcha?
User name blacklist can also help on stop others to spam... My wiki is in Chinese, and I set that none of the user with a username begins with [a..zA..z0..9] alphanumerical charater can register to my wiki. No spammers so far.
After that, if you still decide to delete those spamming accounts with their pages, you might try Extension: UserMergehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UserMergeor even try to hack it to see if there's anyway to use it to delete a lot of users once. Or if some users did a lot of spamming work, you might also try Extension: Nuke https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Nuke. For more extensions to help you stop others spamming, why not have a look on how Wikipedia did?
Spam prevention *Abuse Filter https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter *Applies automatic heuristics to edits Andrew Garrett, River Tarnell, Victor Vasiliev and Marius Hoch *AntiBot https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AntiBot *Simple framework for spambot checks and trigger payloads Tim Starling *AntiSpoof https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AntiSpoof *Blocks the creation of accounts with mixed-script, confusing and similar usernames Brion Vibber *AntiSpoof for CentralAuth https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AntiSpoof *Adds AntiSpoof technology to CentralAuth Sam Reed *ConfirmEdit https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit (Version 1.2)*Provides CAPTCHA techniques to protect against spam and password-guessing Brion Vibber and others *SpamBlacklist https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamBlacklist *Regex-based anti-spam tool allowing to blacklist URLs in pages and email addresses for registered users Tim Starling, John Du Hart and Daniel Kinzler *Title Blacklist https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Title_Blacklist (Version 1.4.2)*Allows administrators to forbid creation of pages and user accounts per a blacklisthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titleblacklistand whitelist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titlewhitelist Victor Vasiliev and Fran Rogers *TorBlock https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TorBlock *Allows tor exit nodes to be blocked from editing a wiki Andrew Garrett
2013/11/25 Jonathan Aquilina eagles051387@gmail.com
Hi John,
I am helping the document foundation with spam issues, and they report a drastic drop of registrations with questy which is really good. I am currently working on being able to have localized questions for the said project. I am not sure how to exactly answer your question though.
My wiki though public does not accept registrations at all. I am the only one with an account.
On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 10:16 PM, John W. Foster <jfoster81747@gmail.com
wrote:
Wow. I am getting clobbered, or was. I shut down the new account system that was open to the public and set it to be by e-mail confirmation, then disabled e-mail for a while.. I then used the deletUnusedAccounts.php a couple of times and it deleted 17860 of the spammers. But they are a persistant lot and some of them actually did manage to get pages up and running, actually hundreds or maybe thousands of them. The challenge is "How do I get rid of them?", & doing it one at a time is useless. How to keep them at bay. I would appreciate any tips regarding this. expecially actual mediawiki settings that get rid of them. I need to know if there is any way to 'delete' them using a list of the user:names seems there should be a simple way to do this, but I've had no luck so far. Thanks! John
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
-- Jonathan Aquilina _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
Some additional tips.
On my wiki, we use ConfirmEdit with Asirra (requires 5-10 edits to disable), which I find to be one of the more effective captchas to frustrate spammers.
I also find it useful to check user all the user names that are obvious gibberish and determine which ones come from the same IP and IP ranges. Genrally, if you want to be sure you aren't punishing legitimate users, only block the IPs and IP ranges that have four or more obvious spammer usernames attached to them, as these are usually mass produced by a bot from zombie computers used to spam.
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 06:33:24 +0000 From: stephdechine@gmail.com To: mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [MediaWiki-l] SPAMMERS!!!!
Why you need to delete those spammer accounts? I thought to ban them with their IP address is enough unless others from the same IP address want to contribute to your wiki.
Actually at that time when my wiki was under spamming, I accidentally blocked two IP addresses, and suddenly...... No more spammers :D or at least not that more. I don't think your wiki would have so much people registering to manually, so that spamming must be done with a program which came from one or several IPs.
Moreover, I tried to use ReCaptcha from Extension: ConfirmEdithttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEditto protect my wiki from spammers, but still failed. I was told that some of the spamming accounts are registered manually and then spammed automatically. Why not ask everyone with edits less than 3 or 5 to do ReCaptcha?
User name blacklist can also help on stop others to spam... My wiki is in Chinese, and I set that none of the user with a username begins with [a..zA..z0..9] alphanumerical charater can register to my wiki. No spammers so far.
After that, if you still decide to delete those spamming accounts with their pages, you might try Extension: UserMergehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UserMergeor even try to hack it to see if there's anyway to use it to delete a lot of users once. Or if some users did a lot of spamming work, you might also try Extension: Nuke https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Nuke. For more extensions to help you stop others spamming, why not have a look on how Wikipedia did?
Spam prevention *Abuse Filter https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter *Applies automatic heuristics to edits Andrew Garrett, River Tarnell, Victor Vasiliev and Marius Hoch *AntiBot https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AntiBot *Simple framework for spambot checks and trigger payloads Tim Starling *AntiSpoof https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AntiSpoof *Blocks the creation of accounts with mixed-script, confusing and similar usernames Brion Vibber *AntiSpoof for CentralAuth https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AntiSpoof *Adds AntiSpoof technology to CentralAuth Sam Reed *ConfirmEdit https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit (Version 1.2)*Provides CAPTCHA techniques to protect against spam and password-guessing Brion Vibber and others *SpamBlacklist https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamBlacklist *Regex-based anti-spam tool allowing to blacklist URLs in pages and email addresses for registered users Tim Starling, John Du Hart and Daniel Kinzler *Title Blacklist https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Title_Blacklist (Version 1.4.2)*Allows administrators to forbid creation of pages and user accounts per a blacklisthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titleblacklistand whitelist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titlewhitelist Victor Vasiliev and Fran Rogers *TorBlock https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TorBlock *Allows tor exit nodes to be blocked from editing a wiki Andrew Garrett
2013/11/25 Jonathan Aquilina eagles051387@gmail.com
Hi John,
I am helping the document foundation with spam issues, and they report a drastic drop of registrations with questy which is really good. I am currently working on being able to have localized questions for the said project. I am not sure how to exactly answer your question though.
My wiki though public does not accept registrations at all. I am the only one with an account.
On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 10:16 PM, John W. Foster <jfoster81747@gmail.com
wrote:
Wow. I am getting clobbered, or was. I shut down the new account system that was open to the public and set it to be by e-mail confirmation, then disabled e-mail for a while.. I then used the deletUnusedAccounts.php a couple of times and it deleted 17860 of the spammers. But they are a persistant lot and some of them actually did manage to get pages up and running, actually hundreds or maybe thousands of them. The challenge is "How do I get rid of them?", & doing it one at a time is useless. How to keep them at bay. I would appreciate any tips regarding this. expecially actual mediawiki settings that get rid of them. I need to know if there is any way to 'delete' them using a list of the user:names seems there should be a simple way to do this, but I've had no luck so far. Thanks! John
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
-- Jonathan Aquilina _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On 11/26/2013 07:38 AM, Arcane 21 wrote:.
only block the IPs and IP ranges that have four or more obvious spammer usernames attached to them, as these are usually mass produced by a bot from zombie computers used to spam.
This is an interesting feature to add to BlockandNuke[1], but it would be good to track if an IP that produces a spammer reappears with a different user name after the spam user has been blocked.
Right now, BlockandNuke just blocks all IP addresses it sees from spammers.
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 10:07 -0500, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
On 11/26/2013 07:38 AM, Arcane 21 wrote:.
only block the IPs and IP ranges that have four or more obvious spammer usernames attached to them, as these are usually mass produced by a bot from zombie computers used to spam.
This is an interesting feature to add to BlockandNuke[1], but it would be good to track if an IP that produces a spammer reappears with a different user name after the spam user has been blocked.
Right now, BlockandNuke just blocks all IP addresses it sees from spammers.
another thing I would suggest is something to indicate what BlockandNuke is doing. I have it running for great lengths of time and all it says is Banning I know works only when I check the blocked users list & see that BlockandNuke is responsible for a lot of them. Just would like to know how long the process has to run to complete the job while it is doing it. maybe a bar or timer, or something. Thanks john
Personally I've found QuestyCaptcha to be the most reliable. You show the user an image and they have to guess the right answer. It can be configured to have several correct answers and to randomly choose from a list of several image/answers.
I have had zero spammer account creations since I started using it several years ago.
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 9:36 AM, John W. Foster jfoster81747@gmail.comwrote:
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 10:07 -0500, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
On 11/26/2013 07:38 AM, Arcane 21 wrote:.
only block the IPs and IP ranges that have four or more obvious spammer usernames attached to them, as these are usually mass produced by a bot from zombie computers used to spam.
This is an interesting feature to add to BlockandNuke[1], but it would be good to track if an IP that produces a spammer reappears with a different user name after the spam user has been blocked.
Right now, BlockandNuke just blocks all IP addresses it sees from
spammers.
another thing I would suggest is something to indicate what BlockandNuke is doing. I have it running for great lengths of time and all it says is Banning I know works only when I check the blocked users list & see that BlockandNuke is responsible for a lot of them. Just would like to know how long the process has to run to complete the job while it is doing it. maybe a bar or timer, or something. Thanks john
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 06:33 +0000, Steph Zhang wrote:
Why you need to delete those spammer accounts? I thought to ban them with their IP address is enough unless others from the same IP address want to contribute to your wiki.
This is on a remote server that I pay for the disk space & the extra service load on the system by spammers slow it down. There are thousands of them as I was not aware of their actions while getting the system set up & I left it open.
Actually at that time when my wiki was under spamming, I accidentally blocked two IP addresses, and suddenly...... No more spammers :D or at least not that more. I don't think your wiki would have so much people registering to manually, so that spamming must be done with a program which came from one or several IPs.
I will check on the IP address thing. Thanks
Moreover, I tried to use ReCaptcha from Extension: ConfirmEdithttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEditto protect my wiki from spammers, but still failed. I was told that some of
I have confirm edit installed
the spamming accounts are registered manually and then spammed automatically. Why not ask everyone with edits less than 3 or 5 to do ReCaptcha?
at the present time there should only be me working on the site as I'm still installing features on it.
User name blacklist can also help on stop others to spam... My wiki is in Chinese, and I set that none of the user with a username begins with [a..zA..z0..9] alphanumerical charater can register to my wiki. No spammers so far.
Hmmm...a lot of the spammers are using chinese characters LOL
After that, if you still decide to delete those spamming accounts with their pages, you might try Extension: UserMergehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UserMergeor even try to hack it to see if there's anyway to use it to delete a lot of users once.
I can use usermerge but it only removes one at a time..too tedious
Or if some users did a lot of spamming work, you might also try Extension: Nuke https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Nuke. For more extensions to help you stop others spamming, why not have a look on how Wikipedia did?
I have Nuke installed as well as BlockandNuke & both work well. They have blocked thousands of these accounts, now if I could just get rid of them.
Spam prevention *Abuse Filter https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter *Applies automatic heuristics to edits Andrew Garrett, River Tarnell, Victor Vasiliev and Marius Hoch *AntiBot
installed & working
installed & working
*Simple framework for spambot checks and trigger payloads Tim Starling *AntiSpoof https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AntiSpoof *Blocks the creation of accounts with mixed-script, confusing and similar usernames Brion
installed & working
Vibber *AntiSpoof for CentralAuth https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AntiSpoof *Adds AntiSpoof technology to CentralAuth Sam Reed *ConfirmEdit https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit
installed & working
(Version 1.2)*Provides CAPTCHA techniques to protect against spam and password-guessing Brion Vibber and others *SpamBlacklist https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamBlacklist
installed & working
*Regex-based anti-spam tool allowing to blacklist URLs in pages and email addresses for registered users Tim Starling, John Du Hart and Daniel Kinzler *Title Blacklist https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Title_Blacklist (Version 1.4.2)*Allows administrators to forbid creation of pages and user accounts per a blacklisthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titleblacklistand whitelist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titlewhitelist Victor Vasiliev and Fran Rogers *TorBlock https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TorBlock
Installed & working
any idea what should be in this array; $wgTorIPs = array( '208.80.152.2' );
$wgTorIPs = array( '208.80.152.2' ); An array of IP addresses that the wiki server uses. Only exit nodes allowed to connect to these IPs will be returned in the internal list. Note: this is only used when the extension has to fall back to the Tor Project's bulk list service, rather than using the newer Onionoo protocol.
Should it be the IP address of my server??
*Allows tor exit nodes to be blocked from editing a wiki Andrew Garrett
2013/11/25 Jonathan Aquilina eagles051387@gmail.com
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