PortlandWiki & Vandalism

[Dave Myers]

Hi All,

Earlier today I spent time cleaning up vandalism that appeared on PortlandWiki since last night. A quick glance at recent changes reveals that Kotra also reverted instances of vandalism late last night:

http://portlandwiki.org/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&limit=100

(July 25 - 26, 2011.)

For the time being, editing PortlandWiki is now restricted to logged in users. Sorry.

So we can get back to less restrictive user access as quickly as possible, we may want to focus on more effective spam / abuse prevention techniques with a goal of coming up with a reasonable abuse prevention / clean-up strategy.

FYI: Recent tests of our current CAPTCHA implementation seems to indicate that it works only intermittently. (It worked when Kotra tested it Monday evening, but failed several tests I put it through over the past week or so.)

Kind regards,

-dave myers

[Ray King]

I had a real problem with vandalism earlier this year and have found that changing the captcha makes a big difference.  It doesn't seem to matter which one it's changed to, but the simple act of changing it seems to throw the bad guys off.  Also, I do restrict to logged in users and put the captcha on creation of login as well as edits with external links.

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[Mark Dilley]

So I was going to ask Kotra what his spam stopping recipe was - because frankly no one in MediaWiki world that I have heard has a solution.

Need to check out http://MarkDilley.net/MediaWikiForums

crapola!

Best, MarkDilley

[Kotra D]

Thanks for upping the restriction as a temporary measure, Dave, and thanks for the suggestion, Ray. I think we will try switching to another captcha soon.

We have used the "QuestyCaptcha" version of the ConfirmEdit extension (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit#QuestyCaptcha) for many months with great success (until yesterday it seems). It asks a simple question that a human would know the answer to (like "What city is PortlandWiki about?" A: Portland). My guess is they solved one or more of the questions (by having a human come in, or matching the answer to a hardcoded set of answers); and so I'm guessing if we just change the questions to slightly more obscure ones (or even just changing the questions at all), it will work again. Or we could try a completely different captcha method.

kotra

[Teresa Boze]

Yesterday morning I posted a message on the physical  message  board at OSCon regarding the appearance of Amber Case ( Caseorganic), Anthony Townsend from the Institute of the Future, ad Wildfred Plinfold of Intel to speak on broadband strategy for Portland, the first city to create one.

 Gotta wonder if some OSCon folks saw Pinfold and decided to  have a go at an Open Access site touting someone from Intel.

Meeting went well, BTW.

It is definitely time to get code that will allow video files. I can't build an archive on PDX geeks  effectively with embedded from other sources that have control to take down | put up.

Thanks.

Best,

Teresa

Concept | Connections, NW

503. 664.4896 twitter: @PDXsays

"Hacker: Any person who derives joy from discovering ways to circumvent limitations." Robert Bickford