INTENSE WIKI SPAM
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I was posting some of the Nemeses videos in the wiki. Two of them were made from copyrighted films: the Spider-Man Trilogy and Star Trek: Nemesis. Are these allowed under the fan videos section? My own videos are created from public domain footage on Archive.org.
As long as you don’t replace whole articles with a random one sentence comment with only a single word misspelled, I think you’re fine.
Spiked Math has a captcha solution which seems to work pretty well; they ask what the derivative of 2x is with respect to x, and automatically fill in the response using JavaScript, which most bots don’t enable. I see the occasional spam post there, but not often, and I think Mike[d Spath] commented somewhere that this works better than the captchas he’d tried previously.
I wonder if we could have something like, ‘What is the name of the assistant of the mad scientist on Skullcrusher Mountain’ or something else which would be obvious even to casual JoCo fans (‘the ____ is a lie’?), but not to bots, possibly with the answer already filled in the way Spiked Math does it. For bonus points, make it a song lyric involving robots.
Struck again. This time the vandal(s) struck the French zombies.
Fixed that, but someone has put some weird spam in the base Album details section that must be linked from somewhere else on the Wiki…
Fixed that… it was the ! template.
It’s almost as if the random-almost-believable-blog-comment bots that I’ve seen around the place don’t realise that it’s not a blog.
ETA: @Bry, is it possible to lock all templates somehow, so that they can only be edited by logged-in, preferably experienced editors? An edit in a template can have a huge impact.
@Angelastic: It’s certainly possible to lock templates (that’s what ‘protect’ is for) but it requires a mod with some free time, which we seem to be short on right now. /:
I’m not sure @Bry has the permissions to install new captchas—does that need to be done by someone with access to the server? Should we be harassing the JoCo team?Maybe somebody could contact somebody over at tmbw.net and see what they do, as it doesn’t seem like they have this problem.
They are using a CAPTCHA from recaptcha.net, at least for anonymous edits. I haven’t tried non-anonymous.
This looks like the kind of attack described here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam#IP_address_blacklists
We used to have captchas. Captchas were ineffective. Taking them out actually reduced spam for some time.
Protecting hasn’t seemed to work — I protected “You Ruined Everything” (see http://www.jonathancoulton.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=You_Ruined_Everything&action=history ) but newly registered users were still able to vandalize. But I can give it a try — what do you want me to protect?
ETA: Forum registration has also been slammed by spammers — I’m getting about 50 new applicants a day, most of whom are fake. I’m sorry I’m not more energetic, but I’m not feeling very enthusiastic right now.
JoCoPedia used to use Recaptcha as well; while that didn’t entirely stop spammers, there’s no CAPTCHA on anonymous edits right now, which is just asking for trouble. This needs to be fixed post-haste. @Bry, please tell us if you can fix this; if you can’t I’ll get JoCo on it ASAP.
Sorry for being behind the times, Bry. (I would edit my prior post but this computer only has IE.) This particular type of destructive vandalism could be prevented by CAPTCHAs, so I think there’s value in having them added back. There’s always going to be vandals, but if a few more people were given power to delete spam pages and accounts there would be less on your shoulders. Is that something you have the ability to grant?
Lemme see if I can add mods — please reply in-thread with your JoCopedia username if you’re willing to help out 🙂
I nominate Boring Manager Rob (forum name unknown) and BLT (@BeatlesLover), for their proven dedication to wiki protection. I don’t think they would argue with greater ability to do what they already do.
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