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