[pmwiki-users] An possible anti-spam measure

Neil Herber nospam at eton.ca
Tue Jun 6 19:13:07 CDT 2006


At 2006-06-06  07:13 PM -0400, David Spitzley is rumored to have said:
>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...

"Nick the bot" used to pester me quite regularly, but I have 
(temporarily) defeated him with some very simple measures.

1) I installed Hagan Fox's csmb-blocklist script (see the bottom of 
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Blocklist2)
2) I *do not* block IP addresses. That is a pointless exercise on a 
web server (does make sense on a mail server).
3) I block based on URL fragments. Just a few spams are enough for 
you to see the recurring patterns, and there are not a lot.

This has defeated 90 percent of the spam on my wikis. I killed the 
remaining 10 percent by requiring a password to edit - but I expose 
the password in the password prompt so that humans can see it right away.

For an example, got to:
http://neil.eton.ca/wiki/index.php/Guest/WikiSandbox

I far prefer a low tech solution like this because it is so easy to 
maintain. Make sure you have mail notifications turned on so that you 
can catch any spam that gets past these defences.


Neil Herber
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/ 





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