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massive spam in the wiki

PostPosted: Thu Aug 16, 2012 4:34 am
by Sir Guts
http://geddon.org/index.php?title=Speci ... &limit=500
thats just the past 500 entries...... I'm sure theres more than that with how many bots and post i see just in the last 24 hours

Re: massive spam in the wiki

PostPosted: Thu Aug 16, 2012 8:42 am
by Derian
Yeah, Galya let me know about it the other day. I'm working on trying to find a solution.

Re: massive spam in the wiki

PostPosted: Sun Sep 16, 2012 9:02 am
by Galya
Yeah, we're both well aware. I try to keep up on it, but I don't have as much free time as I used to when I first started helping on the Wiki. And once you get behind, it's difficult to catch back up. Derian will figure something out.

Re: massive spam in the wiki

PostPosted: Sun Sep 16, 2012 2:46 pm
by Sir Anastasia
Thank you tech wizards for saving us from bot attacks!

Re: massive spam in the wiki

PostPosted: Tue Sep 18, 2012 6:53 pm
by Derian
So, sorry that this has taken so long, I haven't really had much time to spare.

That said, I've implemented a couple new guards against spam. The first is that any post or edit to a page that contains hidden or 'overflow' elements. This is a common way that spambots will add in spam. Because they mark their elements with hidden or overflow, they typically don't show up in a normal user's browser and avoid detection, but robots/crawlers/search engines will pick it up.

Secondly, rather than simply maintaining our own blacklist, I've included Wikipedia's English language blacklist (here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist). This is updated regularly by hordes of Wikipedia mods, so hopefully this will help out quite a bit.