On 04/10/05, Ten runlevelten@gmail.com wrote:
If I might ask, do we know whether the spam problem is coming from people, and not bots?
Both. On the Hants wiki I did some extensive analysis. We found that yes sometimes they appeared to be slow/manual edits of the wiki with someone pasting in some links part way through the page. On other occasions we'd see a squillion hits on the wiki from one address, which appeared to be reading all the pages - effectively spidering the site. This was often done by some kind of perl script (detected by the user agent field). Later on that same day we would see spam attacks on the same pages but originating from multiple different locations which we suspect are open proxies or compromised machines.
Bot protection is much easier than password auth. etc, and if there's uncertainty, it couldn't hurt...
I'm generally against enforced passwords for wikis. It detracts from the community spirity of a wiki. I prefer that anyone can do a "drive by wiking" without having to remember yet another username/password combination.
I am also against systems which involve a mashed up sequence of letters and numbers which need to be entered to change the wiki. These are often difficult to see for sighted people, let alone people with visual difficulties. Is it appropriate to make it more difficult for a poor sighted person to update the wiki than someone with 20/20 vision? I believe not.
Just my 2p.
Cheers, Al.