Spam

Draft

Lookup IP addresses and domain names

This may allow to block whole domains (e.g. in the httpd.conf file or at the system level). Sometimes, wikis are spammed manually and this can help a bit.

• Whois.Net
  • whois by IP
  • Ping (see if a web (or other server) is alive. Takes both IP and name.
• Easywhois.com (alternative to whois.net)
• ipgp.net (find domain names for IP numbers)

Mediawiki spamming

There exist several strategies:

Registered users

To fight spamming, only registered uses should be able to edit. Edit Localsettings.php

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit']            = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount']   = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['read']            = true;

Light-weight user creation that requires some math

This can defeat some scripts

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit

Making user creation more difficult with captcha

This can defeat more scripts

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

Filtering edits and page names

Prevent creation of pages with bad words in the title and/or the text.

The builtin WgSpamRegex variable

Mediawiki includes a $wgSpamRegex variable. The goals is prevent three things: (a) bad words, (b) links to bad web sites and (c) CSS tricks to hide contents.

Insert in LocalSettings.php something like:

$wgSpamRegex = "/badword1|barword2|abcdefghi-website\.com|display_remove_:none|overflow_remove_:\s*auto;\s*height:\s*[0-4]px;/i"

I will not show ours here since I can't include it in this page ;)

Read the manual page for detail. It includes a longer regular expression that you may adopt.

Don't forget to edit MediaWiki:Spamprotectiontext

Spam blacklists extensions (an alternative)

The SpamBlacklist extension prevents edits that contain URL hosts that match regular expression patterns defined in specified files or wiki pages.

• SpamBlacklist extension

Links

General

• Spam (electronic) (Wikipedia)
• Spamdexing (Wikipedia)
• Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam (good reading for web log owners)
• Fight Comment Spam, Ban IP's A large list of banned IP addresses by Chieh Cheng. (There exist others)

General wiki spamming

• Wiki Spam (Wikimedia)
• Protecting Your Wiki From Spam

Mediawiki

• Combating spam (Mediawiki Manual)

• Anti spam features (Mediawiki)