[Hamara-devel] Spam extensions for mediawiki.

[shirish शिरीष]

On 3/28/15, Vikas Tara <vik at hamaralinux.org> wrote:
> On 28/03/15 13:43, shirish शिरीष wrote:
<snipped>
>> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit
> Most of the captcha types seem to offer low effectiveness at stopping
> spam. Do you have a view on which one to use?
>> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TitleBlacklist
> Installed

This is tricky thing to manage. If you put a high wall, then you
prevent most users to come in.

For e.g. there are many ways in which one can have new users.

One way which I have enjoyed is where you have an image which is cut
into pieces and then you have to put it together like a small jigsaw
puzzle, but this leads to accessibility issues besides having people
having spatial understanding and recognition. I have seen few where
colors are asked but if you are color-blind then that doesn't work or
don't know a specific shade/name of color than you are out.

Within the ConfirmEdit there are quite a few different ways to do
this, one of the more interesting ones would be configuring
Quesycaptcha

For e.g. (this I saw in a forum - What is the output of "date -u
+%V`uname`|sha256sum|sed 's/\W//g'"? ) or use questions similar to
http://thingelstad.com/stopping-mediawiki-spam-with-dynamic-questy-captchas/
. That should raise the bar quite a bit.

Another Extension which I forgot to add is
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmAccount - This would
help in combating spam.

>> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TorBlock
> Should we block tor users? I guess some people will use tor to hack /
> spam sites - but could do with some views on this.

If it was a social content site or some other place where
user-generated content could potentially be used to generate content
which might be harmful to the person who is creating it (something
like wiki leaks or Edward Snowdem kinda stories/events) torblock would
have been out of place but this is a technical wiki site. So it
doesn't make sense. What is required is just an e-mail address which
can be verified + some captcha questions as outlined above. Apart from
that people can be as creative as they wanna get (in
user-names/handles/gravatar etc.). As far as IP addresses and how much
history of the IP addresses should be kept, that would probably
involve what the IT Act says where the server/business is located.

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          Regards,
          Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
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