Wiki: Flooded by Spam-Bots.

Hello,

The Wiki has been flooded by Spam Bots. They almost everyday destroy the whole layout of the Wiki main page!
It would be nice if anybody gave me the right to delete the spam wiki-users so that I can fix the problem.

Important: Is it possible to lock the wiki for new users or to switch over to a "Captcha" login and registration? I think both solutions should solve the problem.

Spam Bot Users:

- EdwardPeckoey
- LaneWillisvzx
- EdmondRicerwp
- IvanBartlettryi
- LowellOrrcor
- EldwinMedinanww
- HallWilliamljm
- ConnorRhodeshdo
- LyndonAndersonbfc
- AngusPageaoa
- AlbertCurrybwo
- GilroyMccallpmz
- ZaneBestmxh
- AtwaterBradshawoal
- EddieHullooz
- WardMarquezggu
- AliceNelson
- ~100 more

It really bothers me to fix the wiki main page almost EVERY day. We should find a solution for that.

Thanks,
- Robin

Thanks for notifying - I see the problem. We'll implement some solution.

There are also quite a bunch of articles proposed for deletion (> 600).
Most of them were created by spambots.

http://www.opserver.de/wiki/index.php/Category:Articles_proposed_for_deletion

The wiki is still full of spam... Here are some pages i found. I don't know how to propose them for deletion:

Problem is that the only way to distinguish spam from useful entries is to manually check it. If someone volunteers to regularly look over the Wiki, please let me know for giving you the required access rights.

@JCL instead of looking into the wiki, isnt it possible to receive a notification on creating/modifying/deleting an article?

So whoever has to look at it doesnt have to poll the info, but receives it as mail

Spam is added daily, so you would be flooded with emails. You can instead just look into the recent change list. Every couple of weeks we clean out spam from the database, but that is of course not a proper solution. We have already considered to set the Wiki to read-only, but that's not the real purpose of a Wiki. Another possibility would be blocking the Wiki access with a password.

I vote password and just post the password on a forum sticky. I doubt bots will search the forum for a password to modify the wiki.

Can you not implement a CAPTCHA for every edit an new page? There are some extensions for mediawiki. I think that would already help a lot.(http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit)

Write a htaccess that requests a password for every URL containing &action=edit and post the password in the wiki itself.

There are serveral plugins for connecting a login authentication of a wiki against other sources such as an LDAP or similar services available, maybe you can also link it with the forum's user database and authenticate based on it?