[Mediawiki-l] Giberish - by bots?

[Seth Marbin]

I have been having the same problem (random gibberish edits) on my
teampedia.net for the past few weeks.
I am already using ConfirmEdit, but only have the default setting enabled
(thus no captcha for all edits).

I am considering two options:
- Disabling anonymous edits (i.e. requiring users to register before
editing/adding)
- Changing it so the captchas trigger on any edit.

Any advice about which way to go?

Thanks, -Seth


On 10/30/07, Karl Schmidt <karl at xtronics.com> wrote:
>
> Emufarmers Sangly wrote:
> > On 10/28/07, Karl Schmidt <karl at xtronics.com> wrote:
> >> Having trouble with bots placing gibberish on our site. I first want to
> >> understand the why?
> >>
> >> It could be :
> >>
> >>   * They testing or trying to get setup to spam search engine indexes?
> >>   * They are measuring the time to rollback?
> >>   * Spy code words - pass information anonymously without traceability?
> >>   * Want to destroy search engine ranking?
> >>   * ??
> >>
> >> Anyone have a clear understanding of this?
> >
> >
> > As near as I can tell, these bots (I would call them vandalbots) are
> simply
> > out to maliciously damage wikis,
>
>
> I'm not sure I agree - the defacement comes regularly from a wide range of
> IP - I would
> assume a bot net.  The defacement often has the same words.  I could see
> this as a way of
> passing code words by foreign agents - much to much trouble just for true
> vandalism.  I
> suppose the NSA would know about it in that case. By splattering the
> messages across a large
> number of wikis there would be no meaningful IP trail to the recipient.
>
> A CAPTCHA has stopped it for now...
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Karl Schmidt                         EMail Karl at xtronics.com
> Transtronics, Inc.                     WEB http://xtronics.com
> 3209 West 9th Street                    Ph (785) 841-3089
> Lawrence, KS 66049                     FAX (785) 841-0434
>
> True wisdom is knowing what we don't know;
> True maturity is being comfortable with the idea of not knowing.  -KPS
>
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