[Pmwiki-users] Beating spammers.

[Mattthew Shaylor]

Hi,

I've had an inspired idea for beating spammers: Allow people to edit
the page as usual, but if they want to include an external link then it
needs to be approved by an admin.  Until it is approved it will show up in
the parsed markup (and ideally in the revision history and whatnot) as
plain text rather than a link - or if you wanted to be really malicious
then a link to an anti spam site :)

Ideally the external link privaledge password could be separate from other
admin passwords so that it could be distributed to all regular wiki users,
this way the admin overhead should scale nicely.  Perhaps for advanced
customisation, this feature could be tied in with an ip address, so only
IP ranges that have previously hosted spammers would need their external
links verified.

What do others think of this idea?  I like it because its much less harsh
than plain IP address blocking, it should scale well and be easier to
manage.  I'd assume that once the spammers learn that their links simply
won't ever be authenticated they won't bother.  I don't think it would be
/too/ tough to implement either.

Any thoughts?

Matthew