36 replies to this topic

[Huckleberry Pie]

And, well, since you started a few foreign-language versions of the wiki, then maybe that captcha thing I mentioned would do on the English-language site, at least. Junk accounts can be a pain for the SQL dump, you know.

[iPoco]

Seeing as it's working fairly well I'm going to leave it for the moment. I wouldn't bother blocking/protecting everything related to spammers either - if they're being blocked it's extra work for not much gain.

I'm not concerned about junk accounts, we have hundreds of thousands of them here which are occasionally pruned. If it becomes a problem I'll look into it.

[Huckleberry Pie]

iPoco, on 25 June 2012 - 02:52 PM, said:

Seeing as it's working fairly well I'm going to leave it for the moment. I wouldn't bother blocking/protecting everything related to spammers either - if they're being blocked it's extra work for not much gain.

I'm not concerned about junk accounts, we have hundreds of thousands of them here which are occasionally pruned. If it becomes a problem I'll look into it.

OK, noted. BTW, how about this? http://www.mediawiki...on:Bad_Behavior

But if you ask me, letting the bad guys in can be a PITA on the bandwidth department (in extreme cases, that is). But since actual spam has been reduced upon installation of the plugins I guess that might have been a good compromise.

[iPoco]

I've thought about that one, and also http://www.mediawiki...ion:AbuseFilter. Have you had any experience with either?

Thanks for the CheckSpambots advice , really helping to weed out spammers. Had to disable the ACH blacklists though, they were causing the page edits to be really slow

[Huckleberry Pie]

Yeah, AbuseFilter seems 'swell enough since it can weed things out based on certain conditions. Haven't tried it yet, though. As for the CheckSpambots filter, I only tried using the StopForumSpam API and not the other ones.

[iPoco]

I'll take a look and see, we might be spam free for once

I thought that too until I looked in the check_spammers_plain.php file. Turns out they are enabled by default . You might want to try disabling them yourself, it seems to be the cause of some pages loading really slow (http://huckjones.str...al:SpecialPages). I set the 4 ACH ones to 'no' to disable them and it sped some pages up considerably .

[Huckleberry Pie]

At exactly what part were the ones you disabled in that PHP file?

I did see these lines on the file - are these the ACH stuff you mentioned?

$sNoCheckDroneACH = $_GET['dach']; // Drone.abuse.ch
$sNoCheckSpamACH = $_GET['sach']; // spam.abuse.ch
$sNoCheckHTTPBLACH = $_GET['hach']; // HTTPBL.abuse.ch
$sNoCheckZeusACH = $_GET['zach']; // ZeusTracker.abuse.ch
$sNoCheckBLDE = $_GET['blde']; // Blocklist.de

[iPoco]

Changed lines 70-73 of check_spammers_plain.php to:

$sNoCheckDroneACH = 'no';// $_GET['dach']; // Drone.abuse.ch
$sNoCheckSpamACH = 'no';// $_GET['sach']; // spam.abuse.ch
$sNoCheckHTTPBLACH = 'no';// $_GET['hach']; // HTTPBL.abuse.ch
$sNoCheckZeusACH = 'no';// $_GET['zach']; // ZeusTracker.abuse.ch

[Huckleberry Pie]

Thanks man, that sped things up on my end now.

[Huckleberry Pie]

Oh, and sorry for the double-post, but have you ever tried deleting the user SQL records on the wiki? I can use the Merge User extension on a wiki, but I'd like to get rid of undesired accounts en masse instead of doing it one-by-one.

[iPoco]

Not yet. You could always work on a copy of the DB to try first

[Huckleberry Pie]

Ahh, OK. The User Merge extension seems fine for pruning junk accounts, though. I'd do that if we don't want to end up polluting the databases.

[Huckleberry Pie]

Sorry for pestering you guys with posts, but the amount of junk on the wiki's still overwhelming for me to take care of easily.

[iPoco]

I've disabled creation of new pages for unregistered users. For some reason the accounts were being created, and then the user page was being edited anonymously. Not the best solution, but we rarely have new pages created by anonymous users anyways. I'll take a further look later, but this seems to have slowed things down for the moment .

[Huckleberry Pie]

Yeah, at least that's reassuring. BTW, do we already have an Akismet or SFS API key for snuffing out undesirables?

[iPoco]

No, PHP is doing pretty well along with Tornevall. We tested around 10 of them for a week and then went for the most effective ones

[Huckleberry Pie]

I actually tried out Incapsula for snuffing rogue IPs out, since CAPTCHAs don't cut it anymore in my case. I also needed this as well here on the OSX86 wiki; after all, we're dealing with pages created en masse:
http://www.mediawiki...ion:DeleteBatch

Nuke's fine if a user makes a lot of pages, but we're dealing with multiple users spamming on a large scale.