Re: [MediaWiki-l] Wiki spam. Stronger fightback.

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

While not everybody is able to reduce their profit margins as Christ and 
Tim said, everyone running a MediaWiki wiki can experiment and document 
best practices. MediaWiki already has many defense tools, but they're 
often unknown or hard to use (as this very thread shows).
	One site I reached from the link in the original post sells at 40 $/6 
months a list of a couple thousands wikis which have no captcha at all 
on registration and a few hundreds which don't have rel=nofollow... The 
owners of those wikis need some better reading.
	A few days ago I refactored/updated 
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam ; help is needed to 
coordinate it better with 
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_vandalism . My main 
question is whether IP blacklists help stop all those proxies with 
dozens thousands ever-changing IPs sold for spammers' use, or are just a 
CPU sink.
	On CAPTCHAs, we already know that FancyCaptcha is useless, but it's not 
clear what to do. A tour I did across 500 wikis some time ago seemed to 
show that QuestyCaptcha is vastly superior to the other options, for the 
average wiki. 
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Extension_talk:ConfirmEdit/Wikis_account_registration_tour> 
If confirmed, it could be made the default in the installer, which could 
also make the user set custom questions in the install process itself 
and encourage frequent update of the questions.

Nemo
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