[Mediawiki-l] Giberish - by bots?

[Emufarmers Sangly]

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, much as crackers sift through sites running
old versions of phpBB and deface them.  There doesn't have to be a profit
motive—my luck has been no better than yours in finding one (the vandalbots
I've encountered have behaved similarly, so there may well be a single
person, or at least a single script, behind them; good luck tracking him/it
down).

In terms of actually dealing with vandalbots, your options are kind of
limited: The spam blacklist extension won't help you (unless the bots are
inserting foreign characters or somesuch), and if the bots aren't adding
links, you can't use the CAPTCHA's "trigger only on the addition of new
URLs" feature.  You could try to track the bot behavior and use one of those
tools (or another one, like Bad Behavior <
http://www.homelandstupidity.us/software/bad-behavior/installing-and-using-bad-behavior/on-mediawiki/>,
though I don't know how well it would work here).  Or, if you don't mind
sacrificing a bit of accessibility, you can just set the CAPTCHA to trigger
on unregistered users' edits and registration attempts.


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