On Friday 22 March 2013 12:19:05 M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
On 20.03.2013 15:30, Barry Warsaw wrote:
On Mar 20, 2013, at 10:08 AM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
If we can't get things under control, we will have to start using such a group and disable public editing of pages :-(
FWIW, we've long had this policy on the Mailman wiki. It was the only successful way to control spam. Sign up is open (and yes, we occasionally have to delete profile spam), but folks have to email the mailman-cabal to request write/edit access. We don't get a lot of such requests, so the process is quite manageable, and we get almost zero spam now.
Did this have an effect on the number of editors of the wiki ?
The usual complaint when doing this is that you prevent quick edits (e.g. typo corrections) by raising the bar in this way.
After the recent updates to the textchas, the profile spam has apparently stopped:
That no longer seems to be the case. I am also having to remove these stupid profile spams from the Python Wiki two or more times per day.
So perhaps making the textchas a little more complicated and also starting a process to accept people to the trusted editor group would solve the problem.
It would be nice to know which textchas the spammers managed to solve, but again I recommend non-trivial challenge questions. The MoinMoin Wiki doesn't suffer from this. Paul P.S. I'm willing to work on more advanced anti-spam measures, but only if they get used.