Samuel Klein wrote:
Integrating spam control more deeply into all of our
tools and
services - including particularly MediaWiki - is important for many
audiences.
Many MediaWiki system administrators complain about the levels of spam
that their small wikis receive. Any help in this area would almost
certainly be appreciated.
The ever-helpful wm-bot in #mediawiki offers two links:
<wm-bot> For information about combating and handling spam in MediaWiki,
see <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam> and
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-spam_features>.
Is there an overview of current anti-spam tech (for MW
in particular,
but related: for our preferred Ticket-handling and Mailing-list
toolchains), and projected roadmaps?
I don't think any of this exists directly, but it'd probably be nice to
have. For mailman (mailing lists), I believe we use SpamAssassin and
mailman's built-in list moderation.
OTRS (ticket handling) receives a lot of spam, but I think a good portion
of it gets appropriately filtered. Rjd0060 or another OTRS admin could
speak to this more precisely.
MediaWiki (the Wikimedia wikis) have anti-spam bots, global and local link
blacklists, global and local AbuseFilter filters, a few dedicated
MediaWiki extensions, and probably a dozen or more other tools that I
can't remember right now.
Spam prevention often quickly gets into a discussion of CAPTCHAs, which I
can briefly and vaguely recap. We have a refresh button on the CAPTCHA
displayed on Wikimedia wikis now. Due to how easy they can be broken, I'm
not sure we'll ever have audio CAPTCHAs, though there's continued demand.
Foreign language CAPTCHAs could maybe be coming soon, if we can figure out
how to not make them impossibly hard due to accented characters. And
there's perennial discussion of tying in Wikisource and its manual optical
character recognition (OCR) work with a CAPTCHA system, as reCAPTCHA, now
owned by Google, continues to remain a non-starter.
In terms of integrating spam control, I'm not exactly sure what you mean.
It's largely a cat-and-mouse game involving pattern detection and
recognition. I don't imagine there's any "one size fits all" solution
here, though as said, I imagine any help we can give or receive in the
area of spam mitigation would be welcome.
It also occurs to me that you may be interested in pages such as
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FLOSS-Exchange> as well.
Hope that helps. If you have more specific questions, please ask. :-)
MZMcBride