The Mana World Forums

As you might have noticed our wiki is becoming the victim of spambots which try to abuse it for creating link farms. You can help our wiki admins to fight this plague by marking pages created by spambots and spambot accounts so they can delete them more easily. See
http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Category:Spambot
and
http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/ ... _a_Spambot
for further instructions.

ARgh... I hate robots.

You may want to consider fighting it by putting in a required registration with a visual confirmation type image for user accounts to edit pages. I had to do that with a forum that I'm running... it's a sad fact of the internet these days but often a necessary inconvenience.

Why don't we make registration process a bit more complicated? For example with account moderator - person who will be deciding is that person is in fact human or bot. Or maybe some CAPTCHA images?

i wrote:Why don't we make registration process a bit more complicated? For example with account moderator - person who will be deciding is that person is in fact human or bot. Or maybe some CAPTCHA images?

Seconded, kde's techbase wiki uses mediawiki as well, and has a nice CAPTCHA. I've never seen spam there. http://techbase.kde.org/

CAPTCHA - that's what I was trying to describe...

If you do use one, it would be better to write one from scratch -- there are too many bots out there that can decipher easily available and widely used CAPTCHA scripts.. I used to run a version of phpBB 2 on my website and the captcha wasn't having any effect on the SPAM robots.

We've looked into installing a Captcha thingy on our wiki a few times, but since we're running a rather old version of MediaWiki currently I don't think the plugins generally work with it anymore. Probably we should first look into upgrading our MediaWiki software.

I've had this problem on my own forum. A few days after I created it, I started getting hit by really bad spam bots. What I did was get some phpbb mods that could help. The first one I got updated the CAPTCHA images, and the second one make a dummy question on the registration page. The dummy question just asked something like "What was the color of George Washington's black horse?" You can get the phpbb mods here (http://www.phpbb.com/mods/).

Well, this is about the wiki. I don't believe we have any problems with spam bots on the forums currently. phpBB3 comes with a captcha that can be customized a bit.

leeor_net wrote:ARgh... I hate robots.

This is what the work force was saying in the mid-20th century; look where we are now.
If we do not take care of this spambot problem soon we will be without jobs to give to humans. >:(