[Mediawiki-l] jibberish

[David A. Desrosiers]

On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 10:04 -0500, Chuck wrote:
> My wikis are getting spammed with short text strings like "copasnotra"
> and "romonboel". Based on my limited understanding of spambots, it
> seems like the bots are making these changes as a prelude to doing
> something else

What they're doing is polluting the database of heuristics, by inserting
either common or nonsense words. For example, if (prior to this tactic),
the amount of "spammy" words in the table (Viagra, etc.) was 80% of the
total number of words, they fill the database with common, nonsense
words to get the quality of the filter to lower itself enough to let the
spammy words back through, by pushing them down below that threshold. 

I've seen this used for years while using dspam, but thankfully for us,
dspam has kept us 100% spam-free for years. Not a single spam email or
other garbage in any user's mailbox going on years, with only very
minimal false-positives. 

Perhaps a look at their methods, and rolling those in to mediawiki's
anti-spammy comment approach might be worthwhile? 


-- 
David A. Desrosiers
desrod at gnu-designs.com
setuid at gmail.com
http://projects.plkr.org/
Skype...: 860-967-3820
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