[Mediawiki-l] dealing with wiki spam

[Michael Charters]

hi,

While looking through recent posts to the mailing list and the mailing list 
archives I was surprised to find that MediaWiki spam has not been discussed 
very often.

We run a small MediaWiki site, and we have a large spam problem--we need to 
regularly check the 'Recent Changes' page, remove spam, and then block users by 
IP.

Given that our small MediaWiki has a large spam problem, I wonder what other 
MediaWiki administrators are doing to deal with WikiSpam?

I noticed a feature on the wikimedia.org site earlier today that I think would 
help our wiki out quite a bit:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spam_blacklist

I've tried creating this page on our MediaWiki, but it didn't work--i.e., after 
copying/pasting that Spam_blacklist to the same location on our site, I was 
still able to create a link to one of the pages on that 'URL blacklist'.

Is this a feature that is going to be included in the new 1.4 release, or is it 
already in the 1.3.9 release?  Is there a setting I need to enable in the 
MediaWiki configuration files?

What other MediaWiki features are there to help reduce the spam problem?

thanks for the help,
-Mike