[ZWeb] Wiki spammer problem needs to be addressed ;(

Simon Michael simon at joyful.com
Wed Dec 1 02:12:32 EST 2004


More ideas:

- to catch spammers early, increase visibility of changes. One way: get 
at least one active subscriber on each wiki, or subscribe them all to a 
big wiki changes list, perhaps funnel that to a script that checks for 
too many urls..

- reduce the number of writable wikis. There are too many poky corners 
to monitor. Perhaps some old ones can be deleted or mothballed in 
read-only mode.

- upgrade to current Zwiki. There is a banned_links feature, whereby if 
you receive a mail-out containing spam links, you send it back to 
spam at ..., which adds the urls to a banned list preventing future edits 
containing those urls.

- swiftly revoke membership of spammers

- if spammers are joining a lot - though I think that's unusual -
impose a 24 hour delay or human approval step on member registration ?

- increase visibility of IP addresses of recent editors and joiners, and 
set things up so it's easy to block them temporarily.

- possible blunt technological fix: hack Zwiki's edit() method
to reject any edit containing a url. Especially from a member account
less than one week old.



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