From my limited experience managing a couple of bbs systems (2 phpBB
and one vBulletin), the captcha reduces but does not come close to
eliminating spammers. While I don't know for sure that these are
bots, I suspect that they are based on how they show up on the
different unrelated bbs systems at the same time even though some are
on different servers. I believe there are at least two approaches
that are known to defeat captchas. One involves image analysis while
the other involves mirroring the captcha onto a page promising free
"stuff". Alas, I imagine that vandals have access to the same
technology as spammers.
Jim
On Apr 11, 2007, at 10:07 PM, Eric K wrote:
These bots are striking wikis everywhere. This
extension should be
made part of Mediawiki. Almost every website having public account
creation has some sort of captcha. Image capchas are the best -
people are used to doing that. The image capcha is there yea, but
its harder to install. I'm just gonna do with the text captha.
Here's the link everyone, protect your wikis. These bots are
searching the net for wikis to do their damage:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit
Thanks to Rob C. for giving this link.
Tels <nospam-abuse(a)bloodgate.com> wrote:
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Moin,
On Wednesday 11 April 2007 18:00:57 Mike Wheeler wrote:
I too have noticed what appear to be malicious
bots deleting content
from wikis over the past couple days.
From what I have seen they delete page content starting at the first
ampersand through the end of the page.
Here is one page they hit:
http://www.archiplanet.org/w/index.php?
title=Notre_Dame_Cathedral&diff=550682&oldid=547840
I have seen this on multiple unrelated wikis which do not require
registration for editing. In the above case it was done by a newly
registered user with a six character alphanumeric username, as
described by the first person to report this on the list. Other
instances have been done by unregistered users recorded only by IP
number:
http://www.archiplanet.org/w/index.php?
title=Gunter_Behnisch&diff=550666&oldid=548133
Thankfully they have only hit a few of our pages so far, but we would
obviously like to put an end to it before they do more widespread
damage.
First steps: Allow only registered user to edit, put a captcha on
account
registration and require an email verification.
All the best,
Tels
- --
Signed on Wed Apr 11 20:21:14 2007 with key 0x93B84C15.
Get one of my photo posters:
http://bloodgate.com/posters
PGP key on
http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.
"The campaign should combat the messages of pornography by putting
signs
on buses saying sex with children is not OK."
-- Mary Anne Layden in
ttp://tinyurl.com/6a9cy
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Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054