Strategy for deleting wiki spam pages

[John Ralls]

On Aug 10, 2013, at 4:13 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

> 
> On Aug 10, 2013, at 2:13 PM, Christian Stimming <christian at cstimming.de> wrote:
> 
>> Hi John,
>> 
>> I noticed you regularly delete spam pages in our wiki, which is a very good 
>> thing to do. As you and I and hopefully others have noticed, we now get 
>> approx. 1-5 spam pages created every day, which have to be deleted manually. 
>> 
>> This is even though new pages can be created by users who have been registered 
>> for more than x days. However, once you check the RecentChanges with a view 
>> mode that shows the new user registrations, we notice that every day there are 
>> approx. 50 new users being registered! Some of these will stay silent for a 
>> few days, then - after the waiting period is over - create the spam page. This 
>> way, the waiting period does nothing more than reducing the spam rate, but it 
>> doesn't cut it off completely anymore. This is the same for several months by 
>> now.
>> 
>> I also don't have a good solution for this. I think I can contribute to a 
>> check of  the RecentChanges every 1-3 days, so that this spam is deleted 
>> manually. (The keyboard shortcuts help a bit: Alt-Shift-D for choosing the 
>> page's hyperlink for "Delete this page", then Ctrl-A, Del for deleting the 
>> deletion reason, then Tab-Tab-Enter for really pressing the delete button, and 
>> all this with many browser tabs in parallel between which I navigate with 
>> Ctrl-PgUp/Down.)
>> 
>> However, I noticed in your spam deletions that you deleted only the normal 
>> pages, but not the user pages of those spammers. Probably you look at the 
>> RecentChanges page only with the subset of "Namespace = (Main)". I look at 
>> this page with the choice "Namespace = all". The backside of this is that I 
>> see those 100 new users every day and the edits scattered in between. The 
>> upside is that I see also the newly created spam userpages (in the "User:" 
>> namespace), and then I delete those as well. Do you think you can check for 
>> those as well, or do we need other solutions for this?
>> 
>> Other wikis around have disabled the normal user registration altogether for 
>> this very same reason, see e.g.  http://elinux.org/Main_Page  . Maybe this is 
>> a possibility for us as well? The vast majority of edits in the actual content 
>> is done by known developers from here. By this, we can argue that an increased 
>> restriction of the write access doesn't do much harm, but would make our life 
>> a lot easier.
> 
> Christian,
> 
> I get notified of changes via RSS to http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Special:NewPages rather than RecentChanges, and I check my RSS reader 2-3 times a day. 
> 
> I don't remember seeing any spammer-user who'd created a user page, and when I follow the link to one that isn't blocked, I see the "not created" message and have no option to delete it. I looked at the last 2000 users who "have edits" and found none with User pages.Yet you delete a user page for everyone you block. What am I missing?
> 
> I'm absolutely in favor of taking a more aggressive approach. By shutting off the
> "normal" registration, do you mean that new users would require an administrator to validate them?

The mediawiki manual has a long page on preventing and removing spam:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam

with links to other pages with still more information on the subject.

Regards,
John Ralls