[Systems] Fwd: [IAEP] Wiki.sugarlabs spammers

[Chris Leonard]

This is a known pattern seen recently on both w.l.o and w.sl.o.  Creation of
new users with names in the pattern "Buy {drugname}" and the population of
their userpages with spammy links.  Walter has gone through and deleted the
offending user pages, I went and added some infinite blocks on those users
as "unacceptable user name" just as a precaution.  Hoiwever there is a very
large possible namespace for the spammers to use, so this may occur again.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what else can be done other than to be vigilant
on wiki-patrol.  I'm not sure whether these are created by a script/bot or
by hand.  The timing of new pages being created is slow enough it could be a
human, in which case better CAPTCHA on user creation wouldn't help.

Possibly a counter vandalism bot of the sort that some run on WP might help,
but I'm no expert there.

cjl


On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 7:31 AM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org>wrote:

> Forwarding to Chris Leonard and Frederick Grose, who have extensive
> experience with fighting spam in Mediawiki.
>
> Anything I could do, just ask.
>
>
> El Tue, 11-08-2009 a las 09:28 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso escribió:
>
> > forwarding to the systems list
> >
> >
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: Dennis Daniels <dennisgdaniels at gmail.com>
> > Date: Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 02:55
> > Subject: [IAEP] Wiki.sugarlabs spammers
> > To: iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org
> >
> >
> > I've noticed a serious uptick in spammers on the wiki in the last 48
> hours.
> > http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Special:RecentChanges
> >
> > What can be done to stop them?
> >
> > thanks,
> > Dennis
> > _______________________________________________
> > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> > IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
> > _______________________________________________
> > Systems mailing list
> > Systems at lists.sugarlabs.org
> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/systems
>
>
> --
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/private/systems/attachments/20090811/25143e22/attachment.htm