ashley:
This is beginning to annoy people. Actually, someone registered several thousand accounts (of the form XxxxxXxxxx), though almost all of them have not been used. The others have been used to add spam.
I can block user accounts and IP addresses, and I can grant this privilege to others on whatever basis the Haskell community think appropriate.
I have CheckUser installed (allows me to find the IP addresses of a given user, and find edits from a particular IP address), and this is also a grantable privilege. However, given that the spam is coming from quite a number of IP addresses, I suspect there is some kind of botnet involved.
There is a tool called "rollback" that allows one-click revert of one or more sequential edits from the same user, which makes reverting spam a one-click-per-page operation. Again, this is a grantable privilege and in any case relatively harmless. However, it is only available with MediaWiki 1.9 and later, and HaskellWiki is running MediaWiki 1.5.4, so this means doing an upgrade. The current stable release is 1.13.2.
Should we be thinking about upgrading now? I imagine there are other benefits... -- Don