Avoiding Spam

Wikispam is getting more and more annoying. Wiki pages get high ratings in search engines because of the strong linking between the pages (and each other via InterWiki links). This makes them a valuable target to increase the ranking of other pages.

But you can use a strong wiki community and also some technical means to avoid or remove spam on your wiki.

TextChas

What is a TextCHA?

It is a pure text alternative to CAPTCHAs. MoinMoin uses it to prevent wiki spamming and it has proven to be very effective.

Features:

Tips for answering:

TextCha Configuration

Tips for configuration:

In your wiki config, do something like this:

    textchas_disabled_group = u"TrustedEditorGroup" # members of this don't get textchas
    textchas = {
        'en': { # silly english example textchas (do not use them!)
            u"Enter the first 9 digits of Pi.": ur"3\.14159265",
            u"What is the opposite of 'day'?": ur"(night|nite)",
            # ...
        },
        'de': { # some german textchas
            u"Gib die ersten 9 Stellen von Pi ein.": ur"3\.14159265",
            u"Was ist das Gegenteil von 'Tag'?": ur"nacht",
            # ...
        },
        # you can add more languages if you like
    }

Note that TrustedEditorGroup from above example can have groups as members.

BadContent / LocalBadContent

You can ban certain content within contributions by listing regular expressions on the your 'BadContent' page.

If a user tries to save a page and its content matches any of these regular expressions, then saving that page will be denied (until the offending content is removed from the editor).

You can also enable an automatic update of BadContent via your wikiconfig. This is enabled by this line:

    from MoinMoin.security.antispam import SecurityPolicy

see HelpOnConfiguration/SecurityPolicy

Remove Spam Action

If you are a SuperUser, you can use this action to mass-revert changes of some spammer (or some other bad guy).

  1. Select "Remove Spam" from the available actions.
  2. Select the user (usually part of the IP)
  3. Select "Revert All"
  4. You will see how moin tries to revert his edits. This does not work in every case, so you may have to clean up some of his edits manually.

© Sam Morris <sam@robots.org.uk>.
Content may be distributed and modified providing this notice is preserved.