[Mediawiki-l] jibberish

[Rob Church]

On 16/10/2007, Eric K <ek79501 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>   There is definitely no way to check if an edit is spam or not, except for capthcha.

I have to point out the flaw in that statement, tenuous thought it is
- a CAPTCHA does *not* constitute an anti-spam acid test; all it does
is confirms that, to the best of the test's ability (which might not
count for anything), that we are dealing with a human being, rather
than an automated program.

A human could quite well post spam to his/her heart's content, and
would be able to pass a CAPTCHA (we hope). The default configuration
settings for ConfirmEdit, which CAPTCHA extensions are based upon,
allow registered users to skip these tests, so in theory, one could
set up a spam bot with a few minutes of initial human assistance,
which is why we supplement such things with throttles, "heuristics"
(regular expressions aren't that great in terms of configurability,
but I cling to the hope that one day we'll have decent spam-edit
detection heuristics, even if just for the basics).


Rob Church