Comments on: Mediawiki anti-spam suggestion

by: Gordon Morehouse

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 18:45:30 +0000

Thanks, I’ll add that when I get a minute.

by: admin

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 09:25:26 +0000

Hi Gordon,
You could add something else to your collection of measures. For those who for whatever reason can’t use your other techniques:
Lock the default pages. Those are the pages most often hit by spammer. Those that every Mediawiki installation has. Also the pages linked to from the front page (often default pages).

by: Gordon Morehouse

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 07:20:30 +0000

Please see http://wiki.evernex.com/index.php?title=Blocking_Spam_in_Mediawiki for a HOWTO on blocking spam in MediaWiki.

I keep it updated fairly often and run a fairly active small wiki on which I�ve successfully been able to go back to an open edit (no account required) policy. Successful spam attacks in the last 6 months: 0.

by: Joe

Tue, 27 Dec 2005 22:29:23 +0000

Protecting default pages is one of our recommendations for MediaWiki also. I don’t think it affects other wikis as much since most don’t have built in links to default pages.

Protecting the front page of your wiki is often a good idea. That is often the first thing new visitors will see and it should be informative and help them get around your wiki. It is much less useful if spammers replace it with junk. Most of the time the main page is probably pretty static anyway.

Methods of protecting pages differ a lot between wikis. On some it may be part of the interface when logged in with enough privledges. Others it is under an Admin page. And for at least some that store the pages as text files, it just requires making the file for that page readonly on the file system.