Editing Battling spam

Preventing spam is a constant battle on this wiki, as on many others. It's essentially an arms race -- the spammers come up with a new way to spam wikis, wiki administrators respond with new tactics, and the spammers' methods become more sophisticated. Wikis succeed, in part, because of the ease of editing articles. Registration requirements and other hurdles that stand in the way of easy editing may deter spammers, but they also deter legitimate contributors. The more successful a wiki becomes, the greater the economic incentive for spammers to attack it, so the more it will be targeted by spammers. ==How wikis are spammed== Most wiki spam comes from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spambot spambots], automated computer programs specifically designed to spam wikis by editing articles to include links to spammy websites. Occasionally, a human spammer will also spam a wiki, manually editing an article to include links to a website. Such occurrences are relatively rare, and most anti-spam efforts focus on deterring spambots. ==Current anti-spam methods in use== ===MediaWiki extensions=== *[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AntiBot AntiBot] *[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SimpleAntiSpam SimpleAntiSpam] *[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamBlacklist SpamBlacklist] *[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamBlacklist TorBlock] *[http://www.umasswiki.com/wiki/UMassWiki:Bad_Behavior_2_Extended Bad Behavior 2 Extended] -- added on 07/08/09, working well. The SpamBlacklist extension includes a cleanup.php script for cleaning up spam, which we haven't yet used. ===Regular expression blocks=== Edits that include a large list of spammy words, and some CSS tricks are blocked. ===Blank user agents forbidden=== Via a .htaccess file in the root wiki directory, 403 Forbidden errors are returned to anyone connecting with a blank user agent. ==Spamblocking methods to add if the above does not suffice== If the current methods don't work, we can add CAPTCHAS for unregistered users. This would likely consist of using [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit ConfirmEdit], and see additional details [http://www.umasswiki.com/wiki/UMassWiki:Blocking_Spam_in_MediaWiki#ConfirmEdit here]. We will probably also need to use [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ReCAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA]. Also, we could use [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamRegex the SpamRegex extension], although it requires memcached. ==Miscellaneous== Once a certain spam handling protocol proves reasonably successful, it might be possible to unprotect some or all of the [[Special:Protected pages|protected pages]]. ==External resources for handling wiki spam== *http://www.umasswiki.com/wiki/UMassWiki:Blocking_Spam_in_MediaWiki *http://wiki.chongqed.org//MediaWiki *http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Spam_management_extensions *http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-spam_features *http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proxy_blocking ===MediaWiki extensions=== *http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Lockdown *http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PageSecurity *http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AuthorProtect *http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EditSubpages ===MediaWiki manual pages=== *http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access *http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:User_rights *http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam *http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgGroupPermissions

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