[pmwiki-users] Spam control

[Neil Herber]

At 2006-03-10  02:46 AM -0800, Carlos AB is rumored to have said:
>I was wondering, why not create a space for people that would like to
>spam a site , to do it in a proper way or in a way that won't hurt (bug)
>the admins, users and the content of a PmWiki site.

... snip ...


>How many of the site admins  in this list feel about this idea?

Carlos

I think this is a very bad idea.

Any of the spammers I have had to deal with have no interest in 
playing by any rules. They either want to flood the wiki with links 
to gambling/porn/pharmacy/click-for-pay sites or they want to find a 
way to take over the server. I have had very few vandals on my sites.

Based on this experience, I want to make it as hard as possible for 
spammers to do anything on my sites (I run a PmWiki farm) without 
inconveniencing the legitimate users. For many of the sites, I use 
Apache Basic Authentication to restrict the users to a known group. I 
have no "internal" protection on these sites, because the users are 
all trusted. The one exception is that I have some admin pages locked 
to everyone but me.

On the public sites (best example: http://neil.eton.ca/wiki/ ) I lock 
many groups to editing and use the Blocklist2 script to catch 
spammers on the open groups. So far, it has done an excellent job.

If you do provide a "spammers area"  on your wiki, I would be *very* 
interested in hearing about how well it works for you.


Neil

Neil Herber
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/
Eton Systems, 15 Pinepoint Drive, Nepean, ON, Canada K2H 6B1
Tel: (613) 829-4668