Fwd: [Referata] Anti-spam protection, cheaper "Enterprise" level

[Dan Bolser]

For reference, here is how one wiki farm is dealing with wiki spam.

Cheers,
Dan.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Yaron Koren <ya...@referata.com>
Date: 2 March 2011 19:06
Subject: [Referata] Anti-spam protection, cheaper "Enterprise" level
To: Referata administrators <announ...@referata.com>

Hello Referata administrators,

First of all, let me note, for those of you who have had a Referata
wiki before November 2010, that the the MySQL memory boost around then
seems to have worked, thankfully - as far as I know, there have been
no service outages since then, of the kind that had become
increasingly common in the second half of 2010.

So, some Referata news: sometime in January a concerted spam attack
began against many MediaWiki wikis around the world (or maybe wikis in
general). These hit a number of Referata wikis. Referata already had a
CAPTCHA mechanism in place, asking users who weren't logged in to
solve a simple math problem; but it wasn't working, so I replaced it
with the "reCAPTCHA" method, which asks users to type in words, and
uses the results to digitize old books at the same time:

http://www.google.com/recaptcha

Unfortunately, that didn't work either - it appears that this latest
wave of spam attacks is using humans to break the CAPTCHA. So I added
to Referata a 2nd anti-spam extension, "SpamBlacklist", that prohibits
edits that contain any of a long list of URLs that spammers like to
add links to. That one seems to have done the trick - the spam edits
are gone now, as far as I know.

By the way, if anyone prefers the old math problems to the use of
reCAPTCHA, please let me know.

Also, the cost of the "Enterprise" service level, the highest service
level on Referata, has been drastically reduced - from $250 to $80;
which seems more in line with what people are willing to pay for wiki
hosting these days.

I should note that, for this and any price reductions in the future,
people who were already paying the higher rate will have their rate
reduced at the same time.

Thanks, and, as always, feel free to email me with any questions.

-Yaron