Recent wave of automatic spam on MediaWiki sites. Any solutions?

[Henning Stehr]

We have been hit by a massive wave of automatic spam on PDBWiki in the
last few days. The spammers seem to have found a way around ReCaptcha.
I have heard from some wiki admins that we are not alone with this.

Are there other people here running MediaWiki having the same problem?

Has anyone found a solution already and has recommendations what to
use instead of ReCaptcha?

I will post again once we found a good way to stop the current attacks.

Thanks,
Henning

[Mike Cariaso]

SNPedia's current defenses are reCaptcha +

$wgSpamRegex = "/worldselectshop|ameritrust/";

which stops a bot fond of clumsily posting on very topic specific pages.

As well as

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TitleBlacklist

configed via

http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/MediaWiki:Titleblacklist

to push away one bot which is very effective at making accounts, but doesn't accomplish much else.

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[Hilmar Lapp]

We've recently had to take down open account creation on our open wikis, due to spam getting out of hand. We've now switched to OpenID login, effectively deferring to OpenID providers how to sort out the spam bots. Probably not very effective in the long run, but seems to work for now.

-hilmar

Sent with a tap.

[Dan Bolser]

In general I'm counting on reCaptcha to react to these cracks (lots of
people are also relying on them, so I guess it's in their interest to
do so quickly). What spam removal tools are people using (given the
inevitable cracks)?

Cheers,
Dan.