WikiSpamProblems

rel=nofollow

As of r1.25, I've added rel=nofollow to outgoing hyperlinks, as discussed in [the Google blog]. This may or may not discourage spammers from leaving links in the wiki but it should mean they don't get much benefit from it.

Per-Page Locks

I wonder if it might be worth having by-page EditLocks? for pages that only allow logged-in people to edit those pages? -- Senji

Perhaps. Something that detects "too many" new URLs might be good idea. Richard

Older Discussion

As a permanent measure, I hope to employ a spamassassin type system. Here, a contribution is weighted according to its origin, its contents, and so on. Much of the spam is easily detected. If contributions over a certain weight are received this will autoban, temporarily, an originating ip-range. An IP-range can be unbanned, and a contribution accepted on logging in with a well-known (to VPN users etc) password, or answering a question which is difficult for computers to answer, for example, an image recognition task (picture of tractor, what is this a picture of?). Long-living cookies will also allow bypassing of this check. As the current wiki spam is very primitive, most users will never see these measures.

In the short term, for a few months, I block all APNIC-registered IPs. The alternative is just to take the site down. Maintaining an IP address blacklist is too complex, and APNIC registration is an amazingly good and quick predictor of spaminess. I've a single file from APNIC containing all their current delegations, so it'll be fast to compute without a service invocation.