[pmwiki-users] Spam bots on PmWiki.org

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Mon Oct 15 13:58:38 CDT 2007


On Thu, Oct 11, 2007 at 04:12:07AM -0700, Pico Ben-Amotz wrote:
> Is it time to consider a new approach to dealing with spam bots
> posting on pmwiki.org?  There seems to be more spam than ever before
> with fewer patterns in terms of ip addresses.

Since it appears that much of the spam is being posted without
author names, I've set $EnablePostAuthorRequired on pmwiki.org
for all of the groups except Main.  This should block spam posts
that aren't providing author names.

> Is it time to consider adding a captcha recipe?

Possibly, but I'm not sure I'm quite ready to do that.  One of
my goals is to try to keep pmwiki.org as similar as possible to
what someone encounters when installing PmWiki for the first time.
So, if we enable captchas on pmwiki.org, then that would seem to
argue that we should have captchas built-in to the distribution
(and possibly enabled by default).  That's a bit bigger change than
what I'm wanting at this point.

Another stopgap measure (suggested by Crisses) may be to try using
a honeypot on pmwiki.org to trap spam.  But I'm not sure that a honeypot
would have much effect on the current bout of spam that we're
seeing.

Other suggestions and comments are very welcome.

Pm



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