[Mediawiki-l] Malicious content deleting bots

[Rob Church]

On 12/04/07, Eric K <ek79501 at yahoo.com> 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.

The image captcha isn't harder to install, it just requires more
setup, including Python and PIL to run the image generator, which
people might not have access to.

Another option is MathCaptcha, which sits between the text-based sum
captcha and FancyCaptcha in terms of "crackability", I suspect - it
uses the same logic as SimpleCaptcha, but it renders the sum using the
math renderer and presents it to the user as an image, so in terms of
image analysis/OCR/whatever, it's probably not particularly
challenging to crack, but it's better than nothing.

We aren't likely to ever start incorporating extensions into the core
code, but what we might do is make heavier recommendations about what
people download - adding something to LocalSettings.php to provide
sample configuration lines for the popular extensions (captcha, spam
blacklist, parser functions, new user log) for instance.


Rob Church