[SAC] Fwd: Legit users vs. spam users

[Markus Neteler]

Hi Brian,

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 2:10 AM, Brian M Hamlin <maplabs at light42.com> wrote:
> Hi Markus, Christian, Martin --
> I have contacts at the Wikimedia Foundation, since last year.. here is the chat log just now:
>
>         dbb             hi all - our heavily used (and beloved) MediaWiki just got upgraded, and its time to take a look at the outrageous number of spam users being created daily, and spam pages
>                         dbb             I believe I will get access at every level, but I want to be careful..
>                         dbb             .. just looking into it now
>                         dbb             !!! the sys-admin mailing list says 16300 spam user accounts created in the last four days ?!?!?

--> no, maybe over the past 2 years.

But since the recent updates it gots way worth.

I may note that in the previous version I made a local modification to
ConfirmEdit which notably decreased the amount of spam.
This was not (yet) migrated to the actual installation we have.

>                         wm-bot          There is no such key, you probably want to try: !bribe, !tss,
>                         dbb             "UserMerge and BlockAndNuke have failed" .. it says here

I have installed both.
But BlockAndNuke ignores the whitelist.txt which is rather annoying.

Question for them:
I have a list of 2800 blocked accounts but how to delete them?

>                         dbb             f***
>                         MaxSem          !spam
>                         wm-bot          For information about combating and handling spam in MediaWiki, see <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam> and <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-spam_features>.

... I studies these pages for a few hours...

>                         dbb             oh - MaxSem .. hi .. Brian at OSGeo here
>                         dbb             I have a mess on my hands apparently
>                         wmat            dbb: are they actually creating content?
>                         wmat            dbb: if not, just run removeUnusedAccounts.php to delete all of them

Done but they don't disappear from the newusers log wiki page. Why??

>                         MaxSem          1) disable account creation until more measures are taken

... probably a good idea.

>                         dbb             I have just opened this minutes ago
>                         dbb             yes agree - this is crazy
>                         wmat            dbb: I use a dynamic captcha + confirm account + I blow away unused accounts once a month

I suspect that they spamers/spam bots bypass all this and inject code somewhere.

>                         dbb             we had a tech add LDAP login very recently, and upgrade the version
>                         dbb             we use our LDAP heavily for other sites

Please teach us how to connect our Wiki to LDAP. Martin Spott could
not figure that out.

>                         MaxSem          I don't see LDAP auth at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Special:Version

Yes, we don't have it yet since we don't know how to implement the
connection between our Wiki and our LDAP.

>                         anchit
>                         MaxSem          anchit, mentor? are you a developer?
>                         MaxSem          dbb, meanwhile +2 accounts
>                         dbb             ugh
>                         dbb             ..
>                         MaxSem          disable creation, then figure out what to do
>                         dbb             whats the best way to disable ?
>                         MaxSem          !access
>                         wm-bot          For information on customizing user access, see <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:User_rights>. For common examples of restricting access using both rights and extensions, see <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access>.
>
>                         in other words, $wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

Time to switch that on?

Markus