Spam
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
- Making user creation more difficult with captcha
This can defeat more scripts
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.
Links
- Wiki Spam (Wikimedia)
Mediawiki
- Combating spam (Mediawiki Manual)
- Anti spam features (Mediawiki)