BlockingSpam
Most of the edits in this wiki are spam.
Contents
Information about blocking spam in mediawiki
There are many features and plugins for mediawiki, for blocking spam. The most important ones are described on the following links:
- http://wiki.evernex.com/index.php?title=Blocking_Spam_in_Mediawiki
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_Features
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Anti-spam_features
- http://wiki.chongqed.org/MediaWiki
Steps against spam
Install a CAPTCHA extension
As a first step I'd recommend adding a CAPTCHA when creating an account:
Install ConfirmEdit with $wgCaptchaTriggers['createaccount'] = true (CAPTCHA when creating an account)
The basic ConfirmEdit uses very simple CAPTCHAs which are not very difficult to break. So if any spambot is able to work around it, it's probably a good idea to use FancyCaptcha or ReCAPTCHA.
Remove spammer accounts
Since spammers use the same accounts for spamming every few days, it's very important to block/ban/remove the accounts known to be used by spammers. For an example have a look at the contributions of the user which posted spam I reverted last: http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/KqkYhs
Improve CAPTCHAs
Perhaps you need to install an extension to get better CAPTCHAs, because CAPTCHAs from ConfirmEdit are not very strong so it might be possible that spambots can break it. ConfirmEdit can be vastly improved by installing the FancyCaptcha addon (to get better CAPTCHAs). Requires python for creating the images when installing.
An alternative is installing ReCAPTCHA (AFAIK not broken yet, it uses words from books which OCR software does not understand - learn more), which is one of the best/strongest CAPTCHA solutions. There is a ReCAPTCHA extension for mediawiki, which is based on ConfirmEdit. It does not require python or something like that.
Additional measures
If this does not help, here some additional anti-spam measures:
- add CSS Hidden Spam to $wgSpamRegex
- install (and updating continuously) a good maintained blacklist
- install SpamDiffTool to easily add the posted links when reverting spam to the blacklist
- perhaps also add bad-behavior
