Rubygems Wiki Spam

[Charles Comstock]

Umm all of the rubygems wiki has been overwritten by spam from some
casino online. They are all from the same address so if there is anyway
to ban edits from that address that might be helpful. Otherwise I think
there needs to be some sort of captcha or other protection on all the
rubyforge wiki's before the spammers realize there is a wiki for each
entry that they can hit.

Charles Comstock

 

[Patrick May]

Umm all of the rubygems wiki has been overwritten by spam from some
casino online. They are all from the same address so if there is
anyway to ban edits from that address that might be helpful.
Otherwise I think there needs to be some sort of captcha or other
protection on all the rubyforge wiki's before the spammers realize
there is a wiki for each entry that they can hit.

Until Ruby-Forge adds in Deny directives, you can help by restoring the
last good revision of a page.

Cheers,

Patrick

 

[Chad Fowler]

Until Ruby-Forge adds in Deny directives, you can help by restoring the
last good revision of a page.

This is a problem that Wikis all over the web seem to be facing.
Anyone seen a really good general solution? I guess not allowing
edits would be one, but that would be a shame.

Chad

 

[Jeff Mitchell]

This is a problem that Wikis all over the web seem to be facing.
Anyone seen a really good general solution? I guess not allowing
edits would be one, but that would be a shame.

Pass it through a Bayesian filter before committing changes.

The one I use (comes with Thunderbird) rarely misses identifying spam
and it hasn't mismarked a legitimate email so far.

However it might cause trouble with any porn-related ruby projects
out there



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[Patrick May]

Hello,

This is a problem that Wikis all over the web seem to be facing.
Anyone seen a really good general solution? I guess not allowing
edits would be one, but that would be a shame.

You can't have a general solution to stop spammers. There's a person
on the other end of that computer too. The only thing to do is to try
and waste that person's time, instead of letting them waste your time.

They get the advantage of the first move. We have another advantage --
there are alot more of us. I restored as much of
rubygems.rubyforge.org as I could, I hope that buys some time for the
admin of rubyforge to block that IP address.

Things will get worse, of course. Tragedy of the commons and all.
Still, since HTTP is synchronized and point to point, I think there are
more devious things a site admin can do to an identified vandal

Cheers,

Patrick

 

[Nicholas Van Weerdenburg]

http://www.wikipedia.com seems to have a pretty efficient mechanism, but
it is not fully automated. They block 10-20 ips per day.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist

 

[Paul Vudmaska]

http://www.wikipedia.com seems to have a pretty efficient mechanism,
but it is not fully automated. They block 10-20 ips per day.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist

What what a great place to start when considering wiki spam.
I'm not too keen on capcha if only for the inconvenience to every user.
It goes against everything about a wiki, to me. So a little manual
garbage collection seems necessary for editors or known legit users. I'd
suggest that you'd expedite that process by engaging users if you'd
allow them mark the post as garbage. If it is considered garbage x times
an editor/admin is notified to delete it and ban the ip for x days(or do
it automatically).

This would lead to less trolling for garbage by the admin/editors and a
simple means of enabling the viewers of the site to contribute and no
high tech image/encryption/magic on each page.