Blocking Spam In Mediawiki


Too much spam garbage was leaking into wiki.ucalgary.ca so I wanted to beef up the antispam strategy a bit. Currently, the antispam setup is:

  • Bad-Behavior blocks all requests to the webserver from evildoers (but I worry about false positives, so have whitelisted the entire UofC network)
  • users must be logged in to edit (but anyone can create an account)
  • SpamBlackList uses Wikimedia's blacklist to block edits
  • regex rejects content with sneaky hidden CSS attributes
  • ConfirmEdit adds an extra step if content smells funny, as well as providing a simple match-captcha on account creation
  • SimpleAntiSpam adds an extra (hidden) step to trip up bots

I followed some of the excellent instructions on the UMassWiki on tweaking antispam extensions and config: UMassWiki:Blocking Spam In Mediawiki - UMassWiki. (note there's a problem with the current version of Bb2ext - the Bad Behavior Extra extension - that is easily fixed by following the instructions on the talk page for that extension)


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