[pmwiki-users] PmWiki and Spam

[christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2008, Tegan Dowling wrote:

>>> 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.

I had actually forgotten that you can block IP-addresses, that's pointless 
in practice IMHO as well.

> 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.

My experience is that blocking terms has worked really well on 
wiki.lyx.org. The only repeat spam attacks within a "topic" are those 
where I haven't added new key words to the block list.

> Cool if there were a link "Restore and block" on the History view that,

The main problem is picking suitable words to add to the block list, so it 
might good if you'd see the original changes to the pages together with 
Site.Blocklist, thus more easily being able pick a good word to block.

Once I've blocked a word, I usually search the wiki and fix any other 
pages that have been tampered with.

The drawback with block words is of course if users of the site wish to 
add text about e.g. 'online blackjack'...

Anyway, this strategy (combined with URL-approve) has worked surprisingly 
well to stop the spam attacks that the LyX wiki site used to suffer.

Best regards
/Christian

PS. Since I'm not the one that usually fixes spam attacks (others usually 
beat me to it...), I look at the diff of the pages to pick out suitable 
words to block.  Looking at PmWiki, it seems that

 	basroouel

and

 	libocacnoc

might be spam, although it makes no sense to me...


-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr