Re: wiki main page fubard

[Sascha Wildner <saw@xxxxxxxxx>]

justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Thanks for the note - I reverted to the good version.  It's possible that
> spammer tools exist now that automate account creation and login.  Sacha,
> your user page was mangled the same way, which I reverted.

*sigh* Thanks, Justin :)

Yea, there might be spammer tools by now. Anyone know where one could 
get a copy of them?

I just recently read a (german) article about Wiki spam 
(http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/19/19600/1.html), it seems to be a 
common problem.


> Is it possible to have new accounts need approval?  We should probably
> kill the "YoGa" account that did this, in any case.

So far I've found out only how to block users (which I did for YoGa, as
for all the recent spammers). I can't even seem to find out a user's IP 
address. I guess this (as well as deleting users) can only be done 
locally by Todd Willey or David Rhodus.

User approval might be an idea. Another option might be to require that 
the summary line for an edit must not be empty (or contain a certain 
word or character, which changes from time to time), although we might 
have to hack the MediaWiki software for this (don't know if newer 
versions of the software have options for coping with spam).

I'll try to talk to Todd about this tonight.

Sascha

P.S. Thanks to Ho Young Lee for noticing.

--
http://yoyodyne.ath.cx