[Mediawiki-l] Nonsense vandalism: Anybody else seeing this?

[Emufarmers Sangly]

On Nov 10, 2007 3:28 PM, Trevor Harmon <trevor at vocaro.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've had success dealing with link spam by setting up the ConfirmEdit
> extension, but a strange kind of vandalism continues to invade my
> wiki. Several times each week, an anonymous user will add a nonsense
> word (or words) to the top of a page. For example:
>
> zbnpujhgr
>
> And that's it! Just one word of gibberish (different gibberish each
> time). Spam links or spammy-sounding text (e.g., penny-stock adverts)
> are never added.
>
> It's a different IP every time, so perhaps it's some sort of botnet
> vandalizing a bunch of wiki sites. However, I don't know of anyone
> else having this problem, and I can't understand why any spammer
> would bother adding nonsense words to a wiki. Has anyone encountered
> this before?
>
> Regardless of the reason, I'd like to find a better way of dealing
> with the problem. Right now I'm just monitoring the Recent Changes
> page with my RSS reader and manually rolling back the vandalism when
> I see it, but that takes time. Is there a better way?

This came up less than two weeks ago <
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2007-October/024352.html>;
I'm afraid the magic bullet is elusive.  Enabling the CAPTCHA for all edits
by unregistered users isn't such a terrible thing, though, if you're able to
use the inconvenience to encourage users to register (you probably want to
have the CAPTCHA trigger for registrations, too).  It's not radical
openness, but unless radical openness is the core of your project, that
shouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

One other thing you could try is seeing if you can find what technical
methods Wikipedia is using to deal with this sort of thing (if any, since
they may be relying primarily on their editor pool).


-- 
Arr, ye emus, http://emufarmers.com