[pmwiki-users] Core Spam Blcok Thoughts

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 01:07:43PM -0500, Wendell Brown wrote:
>    Adding a spam block to the core that is turned off by default or with a
>    default basic block list is going to be a major help to those of us that
>    maintain our wiki's, but it's not going to cut down on overall abuse of
>    pmwiki by spammers.  

Personally, I don't think that anything we can do will cut down on 
overall abuse of pmwiki by spammers.  It's just too easy to write
a spambot, and even if we managed to protect 95%+ of unmaintained
sites (which would be an amazing achievement), the cost/benefit
ratio to spammers is still such that it would be worth their while
to target PmWiki sites just to get the remaining 5%.

>    IMHO, a script like MTBlackList (sorry, I have a personal relationship
>    with it) has a major advantage for this type of situation.  Here is what
>    I'm thinking.
>     1. Build a list of regular expressions that identify pmwiki spammers
>        (url's or keywords) - this list doesn't have to be very aggressive but
>        it needs to be updated to reflect the dedicated pmwiki spammers as
>        they show themselves.

...and this is the flaw in the overall plan.  Assuming that
a site isn't being actively maintained, it's not going to be
actively updated either.  And I'm somewhat philosophically against
the idea of automatic updates -- not to mention the fact that
there's not a reliable way to do it from PHP anyway.  For
security reasons, many sites don't allow url-fopens from PHP.

Pm