Wiki Spam

[Astyanax]

The Xenocide wiki page has become a target for quite a few spam bots of late. I've been manually removing the spam, but it's getting worse. Is there a way to ban the login names of these bots? It'd make the wiki easier to manage.

 

The names of the bots are six characters long, and all of them follow this format:

(Capital letter) (lower case letter) (lower case letter or number) (Capital letter) (lower case letter or number) (lower case letter or number)

[Guest Azrael]

Is anyone administrating the wiki? I think that's the main problem v_v we should config it to require to be logged in in order to change it and have only xeno members be allowed to change it.

[kafros]

Ditto

[red knight]

Yes I do, but I do not have that kind of permissions. We will have to notify Micah and Mindstormmaster to see if there is a way to do so...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

[[mindstormmaster]]

I'm looking at an upgrade for MediaWiki. But there are no guarantees it will stop spam.

[red knight]

Posibility to add a Captcha like the one I posted? It has sources in php too add that into the login page (before we hit login).

 

Greetings

Red Knight

[[mindstormmaster]]

It doesn't look like there's a quick and easy upgrade to mediawiki from 1.3.9 to the current version. The best route is probably incremental upgrades using archived releases.

[[mindstormmaster]]

I've managet to get the wiki to 1.4.x but can't get the 1.5 update to work. If someone else wants to try, let me know.

[Astyanax]

Don't really know about the machinations of wiki software, but even so, it seems that the spam has abated for the time being. Thanks for your efforts!

[Guest Azrael Strife]

Sorry! The wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties, and cannot contact the database server.
Access denied for user 'wikiuser'@'pink' (using password: YES)

 

?

[Darkhomb]

All i get is 500 internal server error...

[Darkhomb]

NM It is up now

[gufu]

I'll help! There we're 3 infected pages. Edited August 30, 2007 by gufu

[Astyanax]

Thanks, the help was appreciated. Be careful, though, some of the spambots delete the latter parts of the page, and another removes the plus signs. Those are the really annoying ones...

[Darkhomb]

There are ways to ban accounts, freeorion has the same, don't know what version we have but do it

 

 

diff) (hist) . . FreeOrionWiki:Block log‎; 23:32 . . Geoff the Medio (Talk | contribs) (blocked "YxrL2y" with an expiry time of indefinite: spam)

[Astyanax]

From the MediaWiki FAQ:

A wiki system administrator can block a username on the Special:Blockip page (a restricted special page - look under Special pages in the toolbox). One of the options for the block length is infinite.

Alternately, an administrator with direct access to the wiki database can change a user's password. Scrambling a password is simply changing the password to some random text. The script from the "How to change a user's password" FAQ (above) can be used.

Now we need a find out who's the administrator.

 

These are the accounts that generate wiki spam:

AizPao

Ei4Kr1

EneW5v

IhmQda

Im1Kgo

Iv1A0p

Ju0Pmy

Mh6Xeo

Pf5Fab

Pn5Wfx

PohK81

QwcQ84

SdqF62

VziW7f

XnfBgd

XreSoi

XxxLwd

YzaFyn

Zb5Eat

ZdwDwp

 

There's also an option to prevent new account registration (which would be useful since not too many people need to be editing nowadays). For MediaWiki version 1.4 and earlier:

# Prevent new user registrations except by sysops
$wgWhitelistAccount = array ( "user" => 0, "sysop" => 1, "developer" => 1 );

# Prevent new user registrations by anyone
$wgWhitelistAccount = array ( "user" => 0, "sysop" => 0, "developer" => 0 );

Edited August 31, 2007 by Astyanax