Add Captcha to Wiki

[tjoneslo]

Have you thought about adding a CAPTCHA system to RPGNet to stop the annoying deleter and some of the other spammers? The spammers are getting particularly aggressive over the past two days.


ConfirmEdit (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit)is the default one. But there is also ReCAPTCHA (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ReCAPTCHA). I like the second one, because it forces the Spammer to do some useful work when adding their annoying links. They both look like they work in Wiki 1.6.

I know, more work, but it may help with a really annoying problem.

[Knockwood]

I like this idea. A lot. Especially after the latest round of cleaning up after that bastard Italian spammer who's crapping all over our pages. (At least I think he's Italian, that's what the link text looks like to me.) Shannon? --Kwd

[ShannonA]

I like this idea. A lot. Especially after the latest round of cleaning up after that bastard Italian spammer who's crapping all over our pages. (At least I think he's Italian, that's what the link text looks like to me.) Shannon? --Kwd

Send me some email at shannona at skotos.net and it'll be in my queue to take a look at sometime next week.

[tjoneslo]

Our spammer fiend is getting more and more aggressive.

[Knockwood]

Our spammer fiend is getting more and more aggressive.
Agreed--this guy is spamming huge swaths of the Wiki at a time.

On the bright side, that means it's probably a bot, which means a CAPTCHA should stop him cold.

So, Shannon--CAPTCHA. Now. Please.

(and that other thing we talked about should be implemented too... already cleared. :) ) --Kwd

[tjoneslo]

I also noticed that the Spam Blacklist is already implemented. We may be able to stop or slow him if the spam blacklist pages are updated to stop him posting his links.

[ShannonA]

Looking into it right now. This requires a MediaWiki upgrade first, to get to a high enough version to support reCAPTCHA.

[ShannonA]

And the newest version of MediaWiki unfortunately requires PHP5 which is a pretty big deal that could entirely destabilize the machine ...

[ShannonA]

Well, at least I upgraded SpamBlacklist.

These files should now work:
MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist
MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist

And be accessible only to administrators.

I am going to look at the PHP5 upgrade, but that's a longer term thing.

[tjoneslo]

Drat, and Double drat. I missed that requirement for reCaptcha. Sorry. I know that ConfirmEdit works with MediaWiki 1.6.0+, but also requires the Python image engine, which may not be available either.

[tjoneslo]

Well, at least I upgraded SpamBlacklist.

These files should now work:
MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist
MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist

And be accessible only to administrators.
I added a list to Knockwood's talk page with all the existing spam URLs. I'l go poke him until he can update it.

am going to look at the PHP5 upgrade, but that's a longer term thing.

Thank you for taking the time to do so.

[Knockwood]

OK, I've put Tjoneslo's list in the blacklist... though I wonder about that: we could be getting legitimate traffic from, say, freeweb7.com. But we'll just have to see.

And, Shannon: am I correct in assuming that upgrading PHP would affect both the Wiki and RPG.net itself? --Kwd

(PS: even if so, you'll probably have to upgrade PHP anyway at some point, since being an older version means by definition that they've stopped supporting it... maybe you could run two sets in parallel for a while to smooth out bugs & glitches?)

[ShannonA]

And, Shannon: am I correct in assuming that upgrading PHP would affect both the Wiki and RPG.net itself? --Kwd

Yes, but we're starting the process.

Step #1 is upgrading the stable distribution we're using for our OS, since we discovered PHP5 isn't standard in our distribution. In looking into this we discovered we're one rev of "stable". I believe Erwin is going to look into this.

After that step #2 is figuring out what the PHP upgrade will break and trying to resolve it before hand.

Then we actually do the PHP upgrade (step #3), then I upgrade the MediaWiki (step #4), then I add reCAPTCHA (step #5).

Unless the newest version of stable still doesn't have PHP5, I think we're going to do all this, it'll just take a bit.