Some additional tips. On my wiki, we use ConfirmEdit with Asirra (requires 5-10 edits to disable), which I find to be one of the more effective captchas to frustrate spammers.
I also find it useful to check user all the user names that are obvious gibberish and determine which ones come from the same IP and IP ranges. Genrally, if you want to be sure you aren't punishing legitimate users, only block the IPs and IP ranges that have four or more obvious spammer usernames attached to them, as these are usually mass produced by a bot from zombie computers used to spam. > Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 06:33:24 +0000 > From: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [MediaWiki-l] SPAMMERS!!!! > > Why you need to delete those spammer accounts? I thought to ban them with > their IP address is enough unless others from the same IP address want to > contribute to your wiki. > > Actually at that time when my wiki was under spamming, I accidentally > blocked two IP addresses, and suddenly...... No more spammers :D or at > least not that more. I don't think your wiki would have so much people > registering to manually, so that spamming must be done with a program which > came from one or several IPs. > > Moreover, I tried to use ReCaptcha from Extension: > ConfirmEdit<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit>to > protect my wiki from spammers, but still failed. I was told that some > of > the spamming accounts are registered manually and then spammed > automatically. Why not ask everyone with edits less than 3 or 5 to do > ReCaptcha? > > User name blacklist can also help on stop others to spam... My wiki is in > Chinese, and I set that none of the user with a username begins with > [a..zA..z0..9] alphanumerical charater can register to my wiki. No spammers > so far. > > After that, if you still decide to delete those spamming accounts with > their pages, you might try Extension: > UserMerge<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UserMerge>or even > try to hack it to see if there's anyway to use it to delete a lot > of users once. Or if some users did a lot of spamming work, you might also > try Extension: Nuke <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Nuke>. For > more extensions to help you stop others spamming, why not have a look on > how Wikipedia did? > > Spam prevention *Abuse Filter > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter> *Applies automatic > heuristics to edits Andrew Garrett, River Tarnell, Victor Vasiliev and > Marius Hoch *AntiBot > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AntiBot> *Simple > framework for spambot checks and trigger payloads Tim Starling *AntiSpoof > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AntiSpoof> *Blocks the creation > of accounts with mixed-script, confusing and similar usernames Brion > Vibber *AntiSpoof > for CentralAuth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AntiSpoof> *Adds > AntiSpoof technology to CentralAuth Sam Reed *ConfirmEdit > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit> (Version 1.2)*Provides > CAPTCHA techniques to protect against spam and password-guessing Brion > Vibber and others *SpamBlacklist > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamBlacklist> *Regex-based > anti-spam tool allowing to blacklist URLs in pages and email addresses for > registered users Tim Starling, John Du Hart and Daniel Kinzler *Title > Blacklist <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Title_Blacklist> > (Version 1.4.2)*Allows administrators to forbid creation of pages and user > accounts per a > blacklist<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titleblacklist>and > whitelist <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titlewhitelist> Victor > Vasiliev and Fran Rogers *TorBlock > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TorBlock> *Allows tor exit nodes > to be blocked from editing a wiki Andrew Garrett > > > 2013/11/25 Jonathan Aquilina <[email protected]> > > > Hi John, > > > > I am helping the document foundation with spam issues, and they report a > > drastic drop of registrations with questy which is really good. I am > > currently working on being able to have localized questions for the said > > project. I am not sure how to exactly answer your question though. > > > > My wiki though public does not accept registrations at all. I am the only > > one with an account. > > > > > > On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 10:16 PM, John W. Foster <[email protected] > > >wrote: > > > > > Wow. I am getting clobbered, or was. I shut down the new account system > > > that was open to the public and set it to be by e-mail confirmation, > > > then disabled e-mail for a while.. I then used the > > > deletUnusedAccounts.php a couple of times and it deleted 17860 of the > > > spammers. But they are a persistant lot and some of them actually did > > > manage to get pages up and running, actually hundreds or maybe thousands > > > of them. The challenge is "How do I get rid of them?", & doing it one at > > > a time is useless. How to keep them at bay. I would appreciate any tips > > > regarding this. expecially actual mediawiki settings that get rid of > > > them. I need to know if there is any way to 'delete' them using a list > > > of the user:names > > > seems there should be a simple way to do this, but I've had no luck so > > > far. > > > Thanks! > > > John > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > MediaWiki-l mailing list > > > [email protected] > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > Jonathan Aquilina > > _______________________________________________ > > MediaWiki-l mailing list > > [email protected] > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l > > > _______________________________________________ > MediaWiki-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
