[pmwiki-users] using email spam filters on wiki edits?

[Fábio Reis Cecin]

Hi!

Like many wikiadmins these days, I'm currently fighting
wikispam with edit passwords.

And I just had an idea for fighting wikispam: why not
just use one of those "trainable" email spam filters?
(like the one used in Mozilla Thunderbird)

ideas/thougths:

- if this would ever be a viable idea, then the spam
filter should be run against the whole wiki page,
post-edit, and not against the actual diff/edit contents,
because spammers could resort to entering their spam text
word by word to confuse the filter;

- if spam is found after an edit attempt, that edit
is blocked, and maybe the originating IP address is
temporarily banned also (the admin should receive an
e-mail with the offending edit with a link where it
can approve the edit and unban de IP);

- the filter training could be a rather painful process,
since the wikiadmin would have to manually classify
all edits for a while (doing this by email/reply
would probably ease the process a lot).

- maybe some small amount of spam could get in the page
before the filter "kicks in". but then, it would still
be really difficult to "strongly" deface a wiki page
with 100s of bogus links (which is the one kind of
wikispam that is most annoying, because the "Restore"
/ "history" revisions page gets thrashed and much more
difficult to use). once an edit results in a "spammy"
enough page, the IP gets blocked, and any small amount
of spam cannot get into that page, because the page
already has one or two lines of spam, and any more
spam will increase the filter's "spam" score and get
blocked.

There you have my 2 cents... but only if you "ACT NOW
and CLICK HERE!" :-)

Fabio