[Mediawiki-l] repeated spambot attacks

[Rick DeNatale]

On 9/2/05, Andy Roberts <aroberts at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the prompt reply, Mike.
> 
> With your information  I googled for "defaultsettings.php"  and  found
> it in the  'includes'  directory.   I then copied the line
> 
> $wgSysopRangeBans               = false; # Allow sysops to ban IP ranges
> 
> to my localsettings.php file and changed  false to true.
> 
> This then enabled me to block 69.50.0.0/16  which I hope will get me
> over one longstanding and persistent problem.
> 
> I shall remain susbscribed to this helpful mailing list  in order to
> keep up with developments in the forthcoming struggles against
> spambots, particularly if some kind of  shared blacklist  or bot
> detection strategy evolves.

Consider

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

This blacklists the payloads rather than the carriers. In other words
it checks for urls which wikispammers try to insert into articles and
prevents them from saving the page.

I've found it quite effective, particularly when using a listed based
on that kept by chongqed.org