Hard Light Productions Forums
Community Projects => The FreeSpace Wiki Project => Topic started by: Black Wolf on March 11, 2013, 07:20:38 pm
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I think we need to do something about these spambots. I can't log in to the wiki over the satellite connection up here at work for some reason (well, not strictly true - I can log in, but it logs me straight back out again), so I can't even sort them when I see them, leaving it to TopAce and Goober almost exclusively.
I think we need to halt registrations until we can get a better bot stopping system in place, preferably something that'll also stop the human "bots". I think we can probably afford to be quite a bit tighter with wiki registration than forum (after all, if someone can;t register tot he wiki who needs to, they can always ask on the forum), so something like a quick, very very basic freespace quiz (something like identifying the species of a number of ships) would probably do. But how we sort it isn't so much of a problem as sorting it, because it's gotten way OTT.
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Is there anyway to tie the wiki account with a forum account or such?
Needing an active non-spam account here as valid proof or what not.
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I don't know - we could conceivably set up a system wherein only those who post on an "Activate your account here" thread on the forums or something would get their wiki accounts approved, but that's extra work for Goober or whoever has the power to do that (I'm not sure that wiki admins do, since AFAIK we've never turned it on on our wiki.
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OMG
We've had LOTS of bots in the last couple hours. http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Special:RecentChanges
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Time to stop discussing it. Shut down registration until we can sort it out a better system.
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Seriously. Manual activation probably wouldn't be the most inconvenient thing in the world anyway...I mean, how many legitimate newbies out there are going to need to create a wiki account?
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Not many. We had Hoot some time ago, and another user today (whom I accidentally banned in the bot-hunt frenzy.)
The number of bots outnumber the number of legitimate new user registrations by a large margin.
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K. "Log In" is still available, but "Create Account" no longer is.
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That's a good start, but how are accounts created now?
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That's currently under going a review for what MediaWiki has available to it.
We don't want to get swamped by having to run manual validation (like we did shortly for the forums) because that may not curb the amount of traffic.
Right now, if somebody -desperately- must have a Wiki login, I can probably create one directly on the DB back end.
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Holy crap, that's a lot of spambots.
I've taken the liberty of mirroring Zacam's disabling of registration to both the LocalSettings.exportbegins.php and LocalSettings.exportends.php files, in addition to LocalSettings.php which he had modified. I did this because I had to do the same thing several weeks ago with the videoflash plugin -- that was the only way I could think of to keep it from being repeatedly and mysteriously reverted. We certainly don't need bots suddenly being allowed to register again without anybody realizing it.
EDIT: Also, TopAce gets the gold star for pouncing on those 39 new bots in just the past day.
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I've taken the liberty of mirroring Zacam's disabling of registration to both the LocalSettings.exportbegins.php and LocalSettings.exportends.php files, in addition to LocalSettings.php which he had modified.
Those are used to set the wiki into maintenance mode to backup both database and files. Any modifications to LocalSettings.php would end up replaced by LocalSettings.exportends.php.
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Good to know.
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Did this go anywhere? Shutting down account creation isn't a long term solution unfortunately.