[pmwiki-users] An possible anti-spam measure

Tegan Dowling tmdowling at gmail.com
Wed Jun 7 13:01:33 CDT 2006


On 6/7/06, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 07:13:35PM -0400, David Spitzley wrote:
> > I just had a strange thought regarding wikispam, which I'm still
> > periodically having to scrape off my site even with SiteBlock3
> > running.  [...]
> > One thought that occurs to me is that through a bit of razzle-dazzle
> > it might be possible to use the Author Required feature to block them.
> > What if PmWiki
> > * sent several different author fields with different values for the "name" property
> > * assigned each author field different CSS classes, all but one of which had their "display" value set to "none"
> > * only accepted input from the one visible field, and only if none of the others were filled in?
>
> Intriguing idea.  But ultimately I'm not sure it's going to work...let's
> explore a bit.
>
> First, if we use Author Required as a means of filtering spam, that means
> that PmWiki can no longer automatically fill in the "Author" field on the
> form -- an author would have to manually fill it in on each edit.  Most
> authors would be really annoyed by this, and it goes directly against
> PmWikiPhilosophy #1.

Why would using Author Required mean that an author would have to
manually enter "Author" name with each edit?  I Require Author, but
cookies allow author names to be carried from edit to edit.  Were you
eliding some technical implication of Author Required that I didn't
catch?

(sorry about the double-post to PM)




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