On 18/11/05, Wolfgang Jeltsch
Am Mittwoch, 16. November 2005 20:02 schrieb Cale Gibbard:
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It's unfortunate, but if you don't put a little bit of effort into defending your forms, they will eventually get quite a lot of spam. Cleaning up 600+ pages by hand takes quite a lot of effort, even with the ability to revert.
Is the wiki spam problem really that big? If yes, I would really wonder how Wikipedia deals with it. Since I have never come across a spammed Wikipedia article, it's hard for me to imagine that wiki spam is such a big problem.
Wikipedia has a page just to keep track of where the vandalism is currently happening. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandalism_in_progress There's a ridiculous amount of vandalism going on at any one time, it's just that the wiki is so huge that it's only a tiny fraction of the content, and it has so many users that things move quickly. Yes, HaWiki has been hit several times now with large spamming runs, often where nearly every page got hit. Normally someone who is watching with permissions to do so will edit LocalBadContent and put a stop to it, and clean things up, but it's not uncommon to have to clean 100 pages, and when I got home one day, every page on the wiki had been spammed (700+), and some of them twice, once by a different spammer. This sort of thing is what prompted making all the pages immutable to users not logged in.
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Another way to raise the bar a bit perhaps would be to randomise the names of the form controls slightly, so that a spambot couldn't just use the same names for things every time, it would have to properly load the page and scrape the names out.
This would mean modifying the wiki software, right? This in turn would cause problems with, for example, security updates.
Perhaps the changes could be made upstream. Also, if people are considering writing wiki software in Haskell, it's something to take into account. - Cale