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