[pmwiki-users] Spam status and suggestion for PmWiki.org

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2006 at 11:00:04AM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
>    I don't think that a "honeypot" (aka "spam trap" on mail servers) is a
>    winning proposition for a wiki (see reasons below).
> 
>    I would not want to automate adding items posted on the trap page to the
>    blocklist for a few reasons:
>    1) a malicious individual would simply post a series of valid URLs,
>    poisoning the blocklist.
>    2) a lot of spam includes valid URLs

_If_ we were to implement a honeypot on pmwiki.org, then we wouldn't
block approved urls, and any honeypot-based blocks would go to a
separate Blocklist-Honeypot page to make it easy to distinguish
the automatic items from the manual ones.

>    3) blocking the posting IP is, in my experience, the least effective
>    blocking method and prone to overkill if it is a proxy address

Agreed, partially.  

While blocking an IP doesn't provide much in the way of long-term 
protection against wikispam, it can limit the amount of damage a 
single spambot does to a site.  From what I've seen, some spambots
will hit multiple pages on a wiki from the same IP address -- so
once the spambot hits a "honeypot" page, then it would at least
be prevented from defacing other pages on the site in the same
"session".  That would be a plus.

And if the IP addresses are maintained in a separate 
Site.Blocklist-Honeypot page, then there's no real problem with 
clearing that page from time to time to "restore" the IP addresses 
to the active pool.

Pm