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)