[Foundation-l] Illegal IP blocking on the Dutch wikipedia

[oscar]

a quote from gerardm's link:

***quote:***
I can't speak for Wikipedia's spam blocking process, but I operate a Wiki
that is well known enough to get a lot of spam. I block that fairly
effectively. Seven pieces of true spam have gotten through over the two and
a half years since I implemented the first version of my spam blocking, but
I had almost half my site overwritten at one point before that, so I take it
pretty seriously. I fully understand why many Wiki owners have decided to
make their Wikis read only rather than deal with it and why others have
resorted to required logons, confirmations of the existence of a human, and
other measures. Some useful factoids:

   1. The volume of Wikispam attacks on my site more than doubled last
   month. I'm sure that Wikipedia gets a great deal more volume than I do and
   that they probably saw a similar percentage rise.
   2. Most Wikispam is focused on raising the Google ranking of one or
   more web sites. In the past a huge portion of the volume has been focused
   around pornography sites. This months most commonly advertised site is a
   search engine called Rollyo. Minor editorial: please boycott that search
   engine and its associated blog.
   3. Wikispam has a fairly predictable content and submission profile.
   While many Wikis have resorted to logins and address blocking, I've found
   the content so predictable that I actually removed my IP-based address
   blocking last month.
   4. One of the more predictable aspects of Wikispam is that it is often
   generated from many machines via robot attacks. One presumes that the
   attacker is not paying to use all of these different machines (e.g.
   that the machines have been hijacked).
   5. The middle east (and more specifically, Quatar, Kuwait, and the UAE
   in general) has proven to be a major source of robot attacks. I don't know
   if this means anything, but it suggests that machines in that part of the
   world are either poorly secured or have been effectively targeted by robot
   builders. I also get a lot of robot attacks through (presumably South)
   Korea.

I don't want to make any great claims, at least in part because I don't want
to increase the attack frequency on my site or get slashdotted, but my
software has been very effective in blocking almost everything that the
spammers throw at me. I don't currently block any countries and am reluctant
to publicly reveal the rules I use for the blocking, but do block about a
dozen IP addresses that have been used enough to suggest that they are
directly associated with individual spammers.

***end of quote***

happy new year :-P
oscar

ps the case of thailand and waerth specifically is now being discussed at
the dutch list, and i do hope we find a solution soon

On 1/1/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hoi,
> Slashdot has the following ..
> http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/01/1248251
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
>
> On 1/1/07, annabel <tijmplant at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Waerth,
> >
> > Ronalvd has the support of the sysops on wikipedia NL. He is doing a
> great
> > job by blocking open proxies of which we get a lot of vandalism.
> > Surely he doesn't block all open proxies (only the ones we need to
> block).
> > Please contact him for a solution, instead of posting to this mailing
> list.
> >
> > Greetings,
> > Annabel (@wikipedia.be)
> >
> >
> > __________________________________________________
> > Do You Yahoo!?
> > Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> > http://mail.yahoo.com
> > _______________________________________________
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> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
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>



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