[Pmwiki-users] Wiki-Spammers 1 - captchas

H. Fox haganfox
Tue Jan 11 23:33:00 CST 2005


Robin wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 16:33, Thomas -Balu- Walter wrote:
> 
>>>Captchas usually are randomly generated.
> 
> That's OK, it still works.
> 
> Bot gets captchas from Wiki site -> places captcha on a site visited by humans 
> a lot, claiming they need to answer it to get in -> humans solve captcha -> 
> bot submits their answer to the Wiki.

Isn't this like a car alarm?  Car alarms can be defeated but the extra 
time it takes to steal an alarm-equipped car discourages enough car 
thieves to make the inconvenience and expense of the alarm worthwhile -- 
at least it does here in Phoenix.

Car with alarm ==> Wiki with captcha
Car w/o alarm ==> Wiki w/o captcha

All can be vandalized; the difference is the amount of effort.  I'm 
supposing that the captcha, only used for pages when some number of 
external links are added, might be effective enough to justify the 
inconvenience.

Pardon me if this has already been discussed, but could a page with a 
list of all recently-added links be created?  The wiki spam links I've 
seen would be recognizable as spam.  The page might look like:

http://example.net/myhomepage - Users.Someone
http://example.com/casino - Main.WikiSandbox
http://example.org/mortgage - Main.SomePage

Hagan



More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list