Spambots

[Beligaronia he/him]

Given the sudden outbreak of spambots on the wiki I would appreciate any suggestions on how to deal with this problem.

Obviously one option is just to continue reverting and hope they go away.

Another is to have one of the admins block their IP adresses as and when they appear. This is something I would recommend just as a matter of course to any admins who read this.

A third that I am not yet recommending is to lock the wiki so only logged in users can edit. Actual contributors without accounts would still be able to create accounts and keep editing but the step of creating accounts may block some of the spambots.

Your thoughts? Any other ideas?

[Eerongal he/him]

We can put CAPTCHA's on editing of pages using something like the confirmEdit plugin. It may be a pain in the rump, but at the same time its less work that constantly fixing and correcting spam.

Edit: i suppose i should address the options you mentioned

1) Kinda a non-option if you ask me, and probably the worst thing to do.

2) Should be done as a matter of principle in the first place, but is too much of a reactive method, and we need something more proactive

3) Workable, but i'm not a fan of this option. Part of a wiki's power is in its openness, and i've long been a proponent of "signing up for an account should be optional" as a general thing.

I honestly think Captcha's are the best idea (at least that i can think of). Anyone can post/edit when and how they want, so long as they can prove themselves human. From there, the community will handle all the rest of moderating as need.

[Munin he/him]

Out of curiosity, how does Wikipedia do it?

[Eerongal he/him]

Out of curiosity, how does Wikipedia do it?

off hand, i dont actually know. However, wikipedia DOES have like a literal army of super dedicated people working on it in their spare time like always.

[neverearth she/her]

I'm pretty sure that edits from unlogged in individuals get deleted after a certain amount of time, if not verified. And if you have an account, they can just track your edits and stuff. I've only heard this secondhand though, so it's possible I'm completely wrong.

[Beligaronia he/him]

They just recently went to flagged revisions. (Each edit must be approved by a long-standing user.)

Before that they just used the almighty power of thousands of wiki-slaves. And a strong blocking policy.

[Earendil]

I don't know how confirmEdit works, but one possibility would be to only require verification if it was an anonymous edit.

[Chaos he/him]

Beli is now a semi staff member, assisting with the wiki.

The page that's been spammed is locked now, and pretty soon I will require user registration. Or confirmEdit, which I'm looking into. Depends if confirmEdit can be disabled for registered users. If so, then I'll use confirmEdit.

[Joe ST he/him]

some more spambots? or some sort of wiki-maintenance?

Joe

[Puck he/him]

the spambot strikes again! i deleted the message from the offending article ("God King"), but someone might need to pull some preventative Admin-jitsu

[Joe ST he/him]

spam for as far as the eye can see....