[Mediawiki-l] Spammed to death, need advice please.

[Ralf Baechle]

On Sat, May 06, 2006 at 12:05:18PM -0400, Carlton B wrote:

> OK... I keep getting repeat-spammed by the same spambot.  I turned on the
> SORBS blacklist.  It's driving me nuts.  I'm sure you've all seen the
> catchphrase, I hesitate to post it here for fear of triggering a spam alert
> on myself, but here goes:
> 
> Excuse for my post but I do not have money to buy meal to my children.
> Forgive me please.
> 
> How do I get rid of this spamming lowlife?  It comes from a multititude of
> different addresses, it never stops.

Different spammers and spambots use different strategies.  There is no
silver bullet solution but my strategy which seems to work very well for
me - less than one spam attack per month in recent months - is a combination
of methods:

 o Require users to create accounts.  This is very useful anyway, you want
   to be able to contact authors occasionaly the one or other reason.
 o Use SORBS.  Unlike email where SORBS being a rather big calibre of
   black list frequently causes false positives, SORBS has not triggered
   any such false positive for me yet.
 o Use $wgSpamRegex to catch typical spam patterns.  In my case this were
   free hosters, attempts to use 1 pixel height fonts or other "stealth"
   techniques.
 o Reduce the value of spamming the wiki by setting $wgNoFollowLinks to
   true.  This is the default since like 1.3, keep it.
 o I distructivly remove any spam from the database - as if it never
   happened.

On my wishlist: some content analysis systems to augment or replace
$wgSpamRegex.  I was thinking of something along the lines of spamassassin,
possibly even recycling some of it's code.

  Ralf