Re: [Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] Spam on the Haskell wiki

On 07/30/2012 05:35 PM, Henk-Jan van Tuyl wrote:

On Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:03:49 +0200, Henk-Jan van Tuyl wrote:

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I am willing to do administrator tasks.

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4. ReCAPTCHA enabled for 'edits adding new, unrecognized external links' - which is all of the spam.

This is already enabled.

The HaskellWiki is still flooded with spam; we should take some measure to reduce the stream severely. Most spam seems to be created (semi-)automated; the pages do not contain links, the usernames end with two digits, most of the time. Some cures I have thought up:

There are two (easy) things that will make a huge dent in the automated stuff. 1. Add a fake field, hidden through CSS, labeled something like "You must leave this field blank to submit the form" (for non-visual browsers). Put it on every page with a submit button. If it isn't empty, don't process the submission. You can give it a /name/ that sounds tempting, though. 2. Force previews. If the bots are targeted at your wiki software and you modify it to preview all submissions, the bots will stop working.