[pmwiki-users] Spam Blocking Proposal

[Neil Herber]

At 2006-03-28  03:52 PM -0600, Wendell Brown is rumored to have said:
>To be totally honest, I've considered adding this as an option for
>MTBlackList without the CAPTCHA but I'm a bit concerned about false
>positives.

I do make use of IP blocklists for my mail server, but email spammers 
are a different kind of animal from wiki spammers. I would be very 
reluctant to use any IP-based list for detecting wiki spam because 
the IP in question is the IP of a browser, not of a supposed mail server.

However, there is a different kind of list (which I also use on my 
mail server) used to check URIs in the message body:
http://www.surbl.org/
It is very effective in a mail server environment, but I am not sure 
how well it would work in a PmWiki script, because there is a lot of 
preprocessing followed by a DNS lookup. Implementation details are on 
the SURBL site.

I have implemented what I call an "idiot CAPTCHA" on my site. It 
consists of an edit password prompt that includes the password. It 
would never stop a human or even most chimpanzees, but it has stopped 
the spammer who seems so intent on everyone buying cheap drugs.

When the bot gets re-written to look for passwords in the prompt, 
I'll move to some other technique.


Neil

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