[GRASS-dev] Re: impending wiki spam bombing

[Hamish]

Hamish wrote:
> I notice over the last day or two a high number of seemingly randomly
> generated new user accounts on our wiki site. We can ban these fake
> users as they come and hope we don't hit anyone real, but at 10/day
> it becomes an ugly chore, time sink, and demotivator. Up til now we've
> been getting a few suspect accounts at the rate of around 1/week but no
> automated spam.
> 
> We are up to 908 users registered, most appear to be spambot accounts,
> but only 41 have been manually blocked.
> 
> There are apparently plans afoot to upgrade the wiki software on the
> server, hopefully the new version will contain stronger capcha
> mechanisms to weed out the jerks and we can spend more time on useful
> work. Hopefully it can easily rank and remove bogus accounts instead of
> just blocking them.
> 
> to combat wiki spam we need to keep an eye on the recent changes page,
>   http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/Special:Recentchanges


over the weekend there were 56 new spambot accounts opened in the wiki. I
am now working through the wiki's web interface to ban these one by one,
but it is a big drain of time which I would much prefer to spend on more
productive tasks. the sooner we get this situation fixed the better.


Hamish