On Sun, May 29, 2005 at 12:07:05PM -0400, Myria wrote: Seeing all these complaints about wikibot spam and bogus accounts, I'm considering using an image verification tool for the account creation process on Wikicompany. Eg. using a short string of digits in image form as acceptable proof of direct human interaction. Has anyone already used an image verification tool with mediawiki? If not, I'll try to setup something like like this, and hope it can be made modular enough to be usable with a mediawiki configuration switch. Then I'll ask for evil-bot detection and good-bot repair tools :) Jama Poulsen

On 5/29/05, Jama Poulsen <jama(a)debianlinux.net> wrote: I am not sure how many blind people participate on wikis, but why not go with a simple [math] question that can be answered easily and unambiguously by a person but not by simple bots. I'm not suggesting a full blown Turing test, something as simple as "1 plus 1 is ?" Have a series of these and throw one out randomly.

I know the official line is that one should never need to delete a user, but, as with a few others here, my wiki recently got 'registration spammed' (if you can call it that). There are roughly 200 users with names like "0021fb" and "34a5c8" (see http://wolfandturtle.net/Indigo/index.php?title=Special:Listusers&limit… offset=0). Since my site attracts surprisingly few cyborgs from the future (they have names like that, dontchaknow...), I assume this was all done by a bot. Why a bot would do this, I have no idea, but it almost certainly wasn't to further the goals of my wiki. And, since these 200-odd machine annoyances represent not quite half my 'real' registered user base and make user statistics, the user list, and god knows what else essentially useless or annoying to use, and since they bloody well annoy me to no end, I'd like to delete them... With extreme prejudice. Unfortunately this proves to be something far more easily said than done. I can delete the little buggers out of the User table, which excises those faux-cyborgs from the user list, but the wiki still shows the same number of users, regardless. Poking around the database I see numerous references to those user_id's in places like user_rights (Users have rights? Why doesn't anyone ever tell me these things...?), and I assume that the number of users on the statistics page is either coming from one of those or from, perhaps even more simply, the highest user number. All of which leads me to my question(s). First, if I delete these users from the user table and then troll through the rest of the database deleting out all of the places those particular user_id's show up, are those user_id blank spaces going to cause me problems later? Second, is there any way to renumber the non-bot created users that remain (there having been people who signed up during and after the couple of bouts of 'bot user creation) -- mind you, 98% or so of the legitimate users on my wiki have not actually done squat (In fact I can't imagine why they signed up in the first place, but what do I know?) so renumbering them, I should imagine, shouldn't cause huge issues. Lastly, is there any other option for getting rid of these, short of wiping the whole bloody thing as having been an excruciatingly bad idea in the first place, that I haven't thought of? I really don't relish the thought of going through and manually changing the /nicks of 200-odd users to Annoyingbot1, Annoyingbot2, Annoyingbot3... Annoyingbot201. Not to mention that it really doesn't solve the problem. Any suggestions... Well, any suggestions short of filling the server room with C4, as I'm already contemplating that one, would be welcome... Myria ------------------------- IndigoWiki URL : http://wolfandturtle.net/Indigo/ MediaWiki Version : 1.4.3 PHP Version : 4.3.10 MySQL Version : 4.0.16 Sanity Version : .1alpha _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

On 5/29/05, Dori <slowpoke(a)gmail.com> wrote: >I am not sure how many blind people participate on wikis, but why not >go with a simple [math] question that can be answered easily and >unambiguously by a person but not by simple bots. I'm not suggesting a >full blown Turing test, something as simple as "1 plus 1 is ?" Have a >series of these and throw one out randomly. > >

On 29 May 2005, at 10:51, FxParlant wrote: Seriously! I think bot writers would figure out math questions pretty quickly -- just pipe it to bc(1), for instance. I think simple questions about current events would both be fair to blind people, AND discriminate against those who don't keep up with things -- two desirable features! :-)