Thanks Luis for mentioning Bad Behaviour: all the information about it
on
mediawiki.org was wrong (it was described as an AbuseFilter-like
thing) so I had never looked into it before. You're the first person
mentioning success with it, but it's possible we only hear from unhappy
MediaWiki users which have problems with spam, not from those who solved
the problem. :)
I've updated the extension's page (and others):
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Bad_Behavior
I see two issues:
1) they don't say anywhere if patterns for IP, HTTP headers etc. are
shared and checked on a central location (like Akismet does IIRC) or
kept local;
2) it's probably impossible to use it on Labs given this problem with
cache and privacy, though it may be useful for sites without caching or
with less strict privacy policies.
http://redmine.ioerror.us/issues/41
Nemo