[Systems] Re-enabled account creation on wiki.sugarlabs.org

[Frederick Grose]

On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 1:39 AM, Sebastian Silva <sebastian at sugarlabs.org>wrote:

> Hi,
> satellit reported the wiki was being spammed so I disabled new
> users creation again. I'm not a wiki admin on w.sl.o, nor do I know
> what's the recommended way to purge these messages, but
> would appreciate ideas because local labs wikis are horribly
> spammy.
>
> Regards,
> Sebastian
>

After account creation was opened on  25 April 2013, approximately 770 spam
accounts were created by 26 April 2013.

After the ConfirmEdit extention with the ReCaptcha module was installed,
~16, 22, 18 spam accounts were created per day on 27-29 April 2013.

Then account creation was again restricted and no spam accounts were
created until 02 May 2013 when
6, 12, 9, 12, 26, 3  spam accounts were created per day through 08 May 2013
when it was restricted again.

Several spam pages are created per day by these accounts, which must be
deleted manually.

New account spam is effectively blocked by using only OpenID for new user
authentication.

OpenID authenticated users have full, normal user permissions.

It may be necessary to use the method below for an account to be promoted
to sysop/administrator or another special group.

When wiki account creation is restricted with

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

A sysop can still create a new user account using the following method
(which asks the new user to choose a new password on first login):
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access#Restrict_account_creation


What are the disadvantages to having regular new users authenticate with
OpenID?

         --Fred
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