OK. Yesterday I was looking with a few other ENWP people at what I think
was a series of edits by either a vandal bot or an inadequately designed
and unapproved good faith bot. I read that it made approximately 500 edits
before someone who knew enough about ENWP saw what was happening and did
something about it. I don't know how many problematic bots we have, in
addition to vandal bots, but I am confident that they drain a nontrivial
amount of time from stewards, admins, and patrollers.
I don't know how much of a priority WMF places on detecting and stopping
unwelcome bots, but I think that the question of how to decrease the
numbers and effectiveness of unwelcome bots would be a good topic for WMF
to research.
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Sat, Feb 9, 2019 at 9:24 PM Gergo Tisza <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 6:20 PM Pine W
<wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I don't know how practical it would be to
implement an approach like this
in the Wikiverse, and whether licensing proprietary technology would be
required.
They are talking about Polyform [1], a reverse proxy that filters traffic
with a combination of browser fingerprinting, behavior analysis and proof
of work.
Proof of work is not really useful unless you have huge levels of bot
traffic from a single bot operator (also it means locking out users with no
Javascript); browser and behavior analysis very likely cannot be outsourced
to a third party for privacy reasons. Maybe we could do it ourselves
(although it would still bring up interesting questions privacy-wise) but
it would be a huge undertaking.
[1]
https://www.kasada.io/product/
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