Addressing anonymous MediaWiki spam

20th November 2008

posted in web 2.0 |

Thanks to Rob Jacklin I learned yesterday that the MediaWiki site I setup for StoryChasers has been under heavy spammer attack by anonymous bots for quite awhile. Nice.

This is not an entirely unanticipated situation, of course. Larry Lessig’s personal wiki was the first example of a MediaWiki installation like this I had seen on a personal subdomain. At one point, his site was getting a lot of spam and it looked like the folks supporting his site might abandon MediaWiki and go with a different wiki platform. He’s still using it, so apparently they figured out the lock-down steps which were/are necessary to address those who would virtually vandalize an open MediaWiki site with link spam. Hopefully I can figure out how to do the same thing for the Storychasers wiki.

I inserted the code specified in the MediaWiki Manual:Preventing Access to “restrict anonymous editing” into the LocalSettings.php file for my MediaWiki installation. Since all the spam edits to date were made apparently by anonymous bots, hopefully this will address/fix the problem.

I have not focused on Storychasers much at all since late August, but do hope to advance this project idea further at some point in the Spring. If you have other suggestions (or happen to find other pages on the Storychasers wiki site which need to be reverted/fixed) please let me know, and with an authenticated account feel free to make corrections / reverts / additions to the wiki.

Technorati Tags:
storychasers, spam, wiki, mediawiki

On this day..

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 4:58 pm and is filed under web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.