[Moin-user] Dealing with spammers who create pages.

[Steven W. Orr]

I'm offering this in the holiday spirit and hope I don't get screwed 
because of it.

Over the years, I have had to adapt as best I could because of the 
increase in spam. With the email side of things, it was pretty 
straightforward. The implementations are extremely complex (because of 
my circumstances) but as time goes forward, the complexity has 
increased. As far as email is concerned, I'm in good shape.

Using moin has been a different experience. I started out with a totally 
vanilla setup and slowly realized that only people who are logged in 
should be allowed to edit. The next evolutionary step was to use 
Textchas to foil the robots. I just followed the directions and asked 
dumb questions; What comes after Wednesday? What are trees made of? etc...

Over time, Textchas turned out to be a failure. The total number of 
people who create accounts and succeed at adding a page to sell their 
candles or dick cream or real estate scams was averaging out to over 25+ 
per day, with around double that in new accounts and failed page 
creation. Very annoying.

Then I came up with a simple solution that works *for me*. Your 
situation make not make this helpful *to you*:

I changed the Textcha questions to be of *local* relevance. I can do 
this because the wiki I have is intended for people who are *local*. 
Things like, What state am I in? What river flows through here? Who just 
got elected as Official Dog Catcher? (Not the real questions, but the 
same flavor.)

Since I did it, I have not had a single spammer get through.

Hope this helps a few people.

Steve :-)