[Mediawiki-l] Malicious content deleting bots

[Dave Sigafoos]

Rob,

"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 .. "

I think this is a great answer.  Even as I want enhanced capabilities I
realize that the "core" must remain for its original purpose.  The idea
that those of you who really know the inner workings might make
suggestions is a great plus.

Thanks for that

DSig
David Tod Sigafoos | SANMAR Corporation


-----Original Message-----
From: mediawiki-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Rob Church
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 1:44
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list
Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Malicious content deleting bots

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