Spammers
From OAFsWiki
Anti-Spam Measures
Wikis are vulnerable to spam. Too bad. Typical countermeasures we can (or do) use:
| Measure | Status |
| Project Honeypot, to help populate the worldwide list of known spammers. | Implemented March, 2008 |
| Automatic rejection of edits from IP addresses in the world list of known spam sources. | Implemented March, 2008 |
| Allow only registered users to edit the wiki. | Implemented May 13, 2008 |
| Allow only registered users whose email address has been validated by a send-respond message to edit the wiki. (This gives a much more reliable path back to the spammer, so their illegal actions can be reported to their ISPs and to the authorities in their home countries.) | Implemented Sept 4, 2008 |
| Install "spam blacklist" extension that rejects edits that try to link to sites on a global blacklist or a local blacklist. Add, to the local blacklist, the warcraft site that our parasite attacker has been spamming. If you have a legitimate URL rejected by the spam filter, you can ask to have it whitelisted. | September 4, 2008 |
| Moderate new users first few wiki changes before giving them free editing rights. | |
| CAPTCHA challenges - "copy the word in this image here" things that make it harder for automated robots to fill out registration and comment pages. | |
| Moderation of any pages or comments containing any external links. | |
| Others? I'm constantly participating in discussions in the anti-spam forums on measures to take. Suggestions or references are welcome. |
Anti-Spam Journal
This is an informal journal page of our battle with parasite scum (spammers).
| September 27, 2009 | Spammers have been putting links in calendar entries in our event calendar. Turned on "must be registered to edit calendar". |
| Various dates | 2008 and 2009, forgot to journal them here, occasional talk-page edits with attempts to deposit links to web sites. Most blocked by filters at this point, occasionally need to manually clean one out. |
| September 18, 2008 | User LvHuaJangs added a page of spammed warcraft cheat codes. Updated blacklist, deleted user, deleted page. |
| September 4, 2008 | Upgraded wiki version and installed several anti-spam extensions. Also reconfigured so that only users with confirmed email addresses can edit pages. Set pre-existing known users to "confirmed" for their convenience. |
| September 4, 2008 | Two more users "DearJinlio", and "BeatyMili", recently created, created a spam page full of links to stolen World of Warcraft software. Pages deleted and these users permanently banned. Their IP address has been entered in the international database of known spammers so that spam filters can take appropriate action, and has been reported to both their internet service provider and that provider's upstream bandwidth provider. |
| August 28, 2008 | User "Webrlin", recently created, created a spam page full of links to stolen World of Warcraft software. Page deleted and this user permanently banned. Their IP address has been entered in the international database of known spammers so that spam filters can take appropriate action, and has been reported to both their internet service provider and that provider's upstream bandwidth provider. |
| July 11-12, 2008 | User "RAjd Bonjdf", recently created, created a spam page full of links to stolen World of Warcraft software. Page deleted and this user permanently banned. Their IP address has been entered in the international database of known spammers so that spam filters can take appropriate action, and has been reported to both their internet service provider and that provider's upstream bandwidth provider. |
| May 13, 2008 | Second comment spammer arrived today.
With OAFs permission via a poll, enabled "log in required" to edit the wiki, so spammers must at least register with a userid (that we can then ban). This stops the most trivial of the automated spam attacks. |
| May 8, 2008 | The first spammer has arrived on our web/wiki. An IP address in Vietnam, and listed as a known spammer in anti-spam databases, edited one of our pages and deposited a bunch of random links to non-existent URLs. This is a typical reconnaissance mission before doing actual SPAM. I deleted it and blocked the IP permanently. |
| March 21, 2008 | Linked a deep page in the wiki to a "Project Honeypot" trap. Humans will not encounter this, but the automated crawlers that spammers use to harvest email addresses will find fake email addresses and fake comment forms and, when they send them spam, their IP address is automatically added to a database of known spam sources. Interested parties can see the statistics for this honeypot here.
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