[pmwiki-users] Core Spam Blcok Thoughts
Patrick R. Michaud
pmichaud at pobox.com
Wed Apr 5 14:34:25 CDT 2006
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
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