Strategy for deleting wiki spam pages

[Tommy Trussell]

As a non- (or not-yet-) developer who has tinkered with several pages
in the GnuCash wiki over several years I hope you don't mind if I
weigh in briefly on this discussion... [My password database says I
created the twt username in 2008.]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Christian Stimming
<christian at cstimming.de> wrote:
> 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.

I am all for making it a lot easier. I really appreciate the work it
must take to prune such frequent spam from the wiki.

Since I am NOT a "known developer," however, I am concerned how I and
other people who haven't (yet) contributed code might be reasonably
validated for editing the wiki.

I am also concerned how admins might reasonably prune or restrict the
EXISTING wiki userbase. If my wiki account was compromised I would
completely understand being shut out, but "a few months of inactivity
between edits" could easily describe my normal behavior on the GnuCash
wiki. :-)

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 6:59 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>
> On Aug 10, 2013, at 4:13 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>
>> 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.

I read the mediawiki page referenced above and it seems to me (unless
some more automated solution can be devised) maybe the "gated
community" solution they describe would not be too terrible. I don't
know how it looks from the admin side, but I don't believe the hurdle
of requesting permission would have stopped me from taking on the few
pages I have worked on. On the downside, it pushes the "spam vs. ham"
task to a wiki admin who might rather not have registration validation
added to their plate.

By the way, it was a pain when the GnuCash wiki started making me
re-capcha my edits every time I update pages with links. HOWEVER if it
deters even one spambot then it probably deters hundreds of others and
I can live with it. But if I could get it turned off by getting on a
"trusted" list I would appreciate it.