[Mediawiki-l] Giberish - by bots?

[Emufarmers Sangly]

On 10/29/07, Michael Daly <michael_daly at kayakwiki.org> wrote:
>
> Emufarmers Sangly wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I've had good luck doing this with reCaptcha.  It eliminated (so far)
> all user-creation bots and valdalbots.

I've used ReCAPTCHA, but I'm not sure how much better it is on the
accessibility front: Doesn't it require JavaScript?  I'm also not sure how I
feel about the CAPTCAHs being centrally-stored: Part of the protectiveness
of CAPTCHAs comes in their being relatively unique to each site, so that it
isn't worthwhile to break them.  Centralizing things removes that security
by obscurity protection.  Of course, it also means that if the CAPTCHA is
broken, a centralized group can improve it, but if you're the kind of person
who distrusts centralized Web authorities, ReCAPTCHA might be a problem.

Between you, me, and the mailing list, I just use FancyCaptcha whenever I
can.  I find it more lightweight.  I haven't had any bots get past it
either, so any CAPTCHA's probably as good as any other for the average site
(beyond the simple math CAPTCHA!).


On 10/29/07, Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:

> MediaWiki could improve its anti-spam pages by creating a new page that
> lists the kind of attacks that MediaWiki administrators are running into.
>
> I had hoped that this fix would also stop the spambot which is creating
> dummy user accounts with fake Russian email addresses. I stopped the
> gibberish, but not the fake Russian accounts.

You could always start a page on MediaWiki.org for this. (Look at <
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_features>, <
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam>, <
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_spam>.)


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