wiki spam

[Martin Pool]

On 9/14/07, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
> Seems our wiki has been discovered by wiki spammers.
>
> Disabling a spammers user id requires access to the filesystem - its a
> privileged operation, so the easiest route is to contact one of the
> Canonical staff on #bzr to escalate this to the sysadmins. I'll
> certainly be forwarding usernames I note to be spamming to the
> sysadmins.

It looks like, even before we've started blocking them, they are using
new usernames for each attempt.

It's interesting that although the rate of insertions is certainly
high enough to be annoying, it is fairly low in absolute terms, with
only a handful per day.

> Some options I'm aware of -
>  - there is a proof-of-concept captcha for moin that I found via google
>  - we could ask for the bazaar-vcs.org wiki to have its user-management
>    migrated to launchpad, like wiki.ubuntu.com is. This would force user
>    creation to go through the email handshake to make an account, which
>    is unlikely to be automated at this point

Unless anyone objects I'm going to ask the sysadmins to switch to
authentication through login.launchpad.net, as is currently done for
the Ubuntu wiki.

-- 
Martin