Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 06:33:24 +0000 From: stephdechine(a)gmail.com To: mediawiki-l(a)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: ConfirmEdit<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit>to 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: UserMerge<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UserMerge>or 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 blacklist<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titleblacklist>and 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 &lt;eagles051387(a)gmail.com&gt; _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

On 11/26/2013 07:38 AM, Arcane 21 wrote:. 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. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BlockandNuke

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: ConfirmEdit<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit>to 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: UserMerge<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UserMerge>or 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 blacklist<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titleblacklist>and whitelist <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titlewhitelist> Victor Vasiliev and Fran Rogers *TorBlock <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TorBlock>

$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.

*Allows tor exit nodes to be blocked from editing a wiki Andrew Garrett 2013/11/25 Jonathan Aquilina &lt;eagles051387(a)gmail.com&gt;