[pmwiki-users] Spam bots on PmWiki.org

drew drew.w at verizon.net
Tue Oct 16 19:41:29 CDT 2007


Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> 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

An interesting alternative to Captcha?
   http://www.digg.com/programming/Preventing_SPAM_without_using_a_CAPTCHA



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