[pmwiki-users] An possible anti-spam measure

David Spitzley dspitzle at wash.k12.mi.us
Tue Jun 6 18:13:35 CDT 2006


I just had a strange thought regarding wikispam, which I'm still periodically having to scrape off my site even with SiteBlock3 running.  Obviously, the botified nature of wikispam means that spammers are taking advantage of the predictability of edit forms on wikis.  It seems likely to me that there should be some way of obfuscating things so that spambots can't reliably submit forms on pmwikis.  One thought that occurs to me is that through a bit of razzle-dazzle it might be possible to use the Author Required feature to block them.  What if PmWiki 
* sent several different author fields with different values for the "name" property
* assigned each author field different CSS classes, all but one of which had their "display" value set to "none"
* only accepted input from the one visible field, and only if none of the others were filled in?

This would make it pretty difficult for spambots to submit spam successfully, even when they are equipped (as my spammer does) with the ability to create author names, as they'll either have to guess as to which field to use, or they'll try all of them at once.  I can see an obvious downside for accessibility purposes, if nothing else, but does there seem to be any value to this idea?

On a different front, does anybody have a quick way to block based on an Author Name, rather than on the post content?  I've got a bot by the name of Nick that drops by every few weeks with a new set of addresses that bypass my filter; his IP address is variable, of course...


David




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list