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. -- Ashley Yakeley
On Sat, 13 Dec 2008 12:10:10 +0100, Ashley Yakeley <ashley@semantic.org> wrote:
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.
I think it would be even better when the site is protected with captchas [1], like wipipedia is. http://captchas.net/ provides a free captcha service. It is too easy to create a new user account and to edit pages by means of a forum spambot [2]. -- Regards, Henk-Jan van Tuyl [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spambot#Forum_spambots -- http://functor.bamikanarie.com http://Van.Tuyl.eu/ --
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
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.
For almost 2 years I have been working with Fidelis Assis to adapt his email spam filter OSBF-Lua to broader purposes. We would love to see if it is possible to detect Wiki spam. I am sorry to say that none of the code is written in Haskell :-) OSBF-Lua uses machine learning and probably requires on the order of 100 samples each of ham and spam before it starts to be useful (on email). If you have samples, especially if they are tagged with username and IP address, please send them and I will run an experiment and let you know if we can help. Our tool divides messages into three classes: Confidently ham Confidently spam Low confidence For the tool to work, a significant fraction of messages with low confidence need to be trained by a person. A major engineering question is who gets training privileges: there need to be enough people so that training is not burdensome, yet few enough so that one doesn't grant training privileges to spammers. Fidelis and I can think about adding some sort of audit trail that would make it possible undo all trainings done by a given user, for example. Norman
participants (4)
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Ashley Yakeley -
Don Stewart -
Henk-Jan van Tuyl -
Norman Ramsey