[PLUG] Spam on the plug wiki (2)

[Jason Dagit]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 06:06:58AM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:
>> On Mon, 30 Mar 2009, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
>>
>> >The best questions will be the ones everybody can answer, and most robots
>> >cannot.
>>
>>   Are the robots capable of correctly parsing the question? Is there a way
>> to restrict wiki postings to subscribers of the mail list? I ask out of
>> ignorance. I've made use of application-specific wikis and have not seen
>> messages on the associated mail lists of wiki spam, so I'm curious why this
>> one is different.
>
> Someday there may be a robot capable of parsing the questions,
> but the robots are not customized or sophisticated; for now they
> just quit and move on.  I thought of an easier way to fool robots,
> and doesn't require much special knowledge, just the ability to
> parse english, for example:

I like your suggestion, but I have also seen the use of SSL as a way
to deter wiki spam bots.  I don't really understand why using https
instead of http deters bots, it seems like the author could easily
update the bot to support SSL but a friend of mine put his personal
mediawiki instance behind https and it stopped all the spammers.

Anyway, just a thought.  I don't really know if this suggestion is
appropriate for the wiki.

Jason