[pmwiki-users] PmWiki and Spam

Tegan Dowling tmdowling at gmail.com
Tue Jan 8 18:03:15 CST 2008


On Jan 8, 2008 5:23 PM, Kathryn Andersen
<kat_lists at katspace.homelinux.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 11:37:28PM +0100, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tue, 8 Jan 2008, Tegan Dowling wrote:
> >
> >> I agree -- if Simon, XES, Petko and Anno were to tire, the site would
> >> become
> >> wall-to-wall spam within hours.  it's time for a password or captcha.
> >
> > Have you tried adding terms to Site.Blocklist?
>
> I assume they have.  The problem with Site.Blocklist is that it's
> reactive, rather than preventative: one can only know what things
> to add to the Blocklist *after* one has been spammed.  Which means
> that it is good for preventing *repeat* offences, but not for stopping
> the initial attacks. And the attacks are always changing.  Hence,
> the tiring work involved at keeping a prominent site like pmwiki.org
> spam-free.

I used to, but recently discovered that if you take any three recent
defacements and look at the IPs used, they're all different.  The
software is too clever for the basic IP-based exclusion (at least, I
think that's what I discovered -- may be mis-remembering).  That
leaves blocking terms.  Too much work, when just doing a de-spamming
"restore" is already too much work.  I see that Simon still goes to
the trouble, though.

Cool if there were a link "Restore and block" on the History view
that, when the user (user with the right password, I'd think) clicked,
would do the roll-back and bring up the blocklist, with a from with
the IP address pre-entered and a field for option term(s) to block.



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