[Bioperl-l] Odd spamming on bioperl wiki

[Mark Johnson]

Looks like MediaWiki has some built in functionality:

    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_Features
    http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit

I'm not sure I'd call what they're doing spam, more like vandalism,
but either way, I don't see the point (though I only looked at a
couple examples via Recent Changes).

If they're indeed bots, maybe it's time to enable Captchas? Depending
on who they are and what their goals are, that may get rid of them
completely or just slow them down.

On 4/11/07, Chris Fields <cjfields at uiuc.edu> wrote:
> I'm posting this to the mail list in case anyone has any ideas on
> what is going on...
>
> I have noticed an odd (read: annoying) rash of spam on the wiki.
> Jason also ran some spam reversions, so maybe he can chime in.
> Essentially it looks like the responsible spambots 'correct' the wiki
> text and links, so that '+' is being removed and URI-encoded symbols
> in links are reverted to symbols.  Unfortunately the removal occurs
> in all text, so places where '+' is intended (for instance, raw text
> for showing example record formats) are also changed.  My guess is
> we'll need to block the IP address or add to the blacklist if possible.
>
> Between Jason and I we have blocked ~9 spambots and counting.
> Couldn't find anything via Google yet...
>
> chris