Rosetta Code:Village Pump/Fight spam

How can we fight this spam which is attacking RC nowadays? I don't like too much black listing of netblocks as suggested maybe somewhere, since you could block also "common" people. I've seen a brand new spam user after posting to Named Argument, and I've discovered I can't do too much more than saying I've seen it. I've also noticed the name of these spammers follow a pattern which could be identified (but likely will change...) ... --ShinTakezou 11:17, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

On the Tcler's Wiki, we block problem netblocks from making updates (well, we actually show the spammer a preview page but never commit it to the database, which is a nicer solution as they think they've spammed you successfully) but without seeing the logs for addresses where those spam users are being created from, it's hard to tell whether that will work. It's a fairly stupid spammer though, since external links are all nofollow-marked. Maybe simple techniques will work for now. Plus visibly blocking that netblock from creating a new user too. —Donal Fellows 13:51, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

I didn't want to block the IPs because we had previously had a problem with an IP collision with a legitimate user. I'm not really sure what else I can do. We do have a CAPTCHA, but maybe it's not good enough. --Mwn3d 13:57, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Since I think it's not robotic spam, I can't see that a CAPTCHA would help. —Donal Fellows 14:13, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Yeah and I wouldn't suggest turning off anonymous edits because we've had a recent surge of legitimate anonymous editors (and some people would probably think that was inconvenient). We may just have to keep up the old fashioned delete and block strategy. --Mwn3d 14:25, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Gah. Drop off the face of the planet for a weekend and come back to another spam influx. It could very well be robotic spam if they have a human being sign up the account; CAPTCHAs are only presented to anonymous edits, account creation and login failures. Those settings have worked well for us for the better part of two years. Roboticizing after account creation was an eventuality, but it depended on someone deciding that RC was a big enough target to go the extra steps. (And extra steps are something that the spam economic model tends to avoid; They'd rather hit more weak targets than fewer higher profile ones.) I'm not going to have time to tweak the server settings for a few days, at least. In the mean time, let's watch to see if the problem is going to be bad enough to warrant significant attention. (Unless they've broken reCAPTCHA, it's roughly 1:1 manual labor, which is uneconomic for spammers.) If need be, it might be possible to do a halfway-block; Rather than an outright ban on a user or IP, force all edits from them to go through reCAPTCHA. But that will likely require modding an extension, which I don't have time for right now. --Short Circuit 16:17, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't know if it's possible, but we can deny accounts containing "buy" in their names. --Guga360 16:35, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

If the accounts are manually created, this will not give you much. As soon as the spammer gets the error message, he'll just change the account name to something which works. A better idea would be to special-case edits adding hyperlinks, and demand a captcha for those even for logged-in users. That would stop bots adding links, while not affecting normal users too much (few legitimate edits contain external links, therefore having to solve a captcha in those cases would not be too much of a burden). You could also maintain a whitelist for URLs not protected by captchas (e.g. everything on wikipedia.org), in order to minimize the impact for legitimate edits. --Ce 09:10, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

For Wikipedia there's the special wp: link domain. —Donal Fellows 11:01, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Don't give an error message to the spammy accounts. Just silently fail to commit any changes they make. (Better would be giving them their own view of the world, but that's more work.) —Donal Fellows 11:13, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Then diagnosing and resolving false positives would be a PITA. --Short Circuit 14:55, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

If links trigger captchas, then the bots will just post raw URLs. I've seen that one before... --Short Circuit 14:55, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Timing

The creation of each of those accounts requires some form of manual attention. Keep an eye out for a schedule on when they seem to be appearing. For someone to go to that much work to spam a site like this is rather odd. --Short Circuit 00:26, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

We're seeing the same sort of spam at the erights.org wiki, also a MediaWiki; if you want to do analysis looking there as well might be useful. (Feel free to help with the deleting, of course :-) ) --Kevin Reid 00:42, 1 July 2009 (UTC)