Steven Walling wrote:
MZ: you mean removing just for account creation right? There is also a CAPTCHA delivered on external link addition for some editors–I think IPs and users not autoconfirmed. This is probably a lot more important for combating spam.
For testwiki, we actually set $wmgEnableCaptcha to false, which disabled both ConfirmEdit and FancyCaptcha entirely. My suspicion is that we need "enhanced spam protection" only on larger wikis and on a few smaller wikis that happen to be the target of spammers for whatever reason. Even on sites that are frequent spam targets, smarter heuristics, as Robert suggests, and existing tools such as AbuseFilter may be sufficient.
(Sorry for top posting. On my phone.)
No worries. I'm glad to see that you're still active here. :-)
MZMcBride