more Wiki Spam Help (please)

[BattlerockX]

This is a continuation of the previous thread: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,3350.0.html

I have once again been playing whack-a-spammer on behalf of Sin Stalker, and it is to the point where I have had to block/ban five or six spam accounts not only every day, but every six-to-twelve hours again for the past few weeks.

One of the things I've noticed is that the IP addresses are no longer appearing on the accounts I've been block/banning, so blocking IP addresses cannot work.  Is there any way to FORCE an IP to be recognized before an account be created?

I have suggested to Sin that perhaps a different role be created to prohibit people from creating or editing anything without moving them to that role.  Would this be a good short-term plan? 

This has been getting very frustrating for me, so any assistance would be appreciated.

[TonyV]

Hang on, are you referring to our wiki, or to Sin Stalker's CoH Comic Index wiki?

If it's the latter, I'll have to look into it, but it might be a while since I've been working on a few other projects.  I can tell you that on the Paragon Wiki, the account creation mechanism within MediaWiki has been disabled and all accounts must be created via the Titan Key page.  I think that saves us from most wiki spam, since the spambots don't know how to register Titan Accounts and no one has (thankfully!) written a Titan spambot yet.

My honest suggestion would be to create your own account creation and authentication mechanism, something that the spambots won't easily know how to get around.  Other than that, there are ways within MediaWiki to deny write permission to all but some accounts.  It might not be ideal, but you might want to consider doing something like requiring all new accounts to be validated by an administrator before allowing them to edit the wiki.  I can't give you the details on how that's done because I'm at work and can't look into it right now, but it might be a good starting point.

[BattlerockX]

Yes, sorry Tony, it's cohcomicindex.  Sorry, I should have clarified that.

Do you know if the registration can include additional features that a spambot would not be able to guess, i.e. a home server or in-game global address?

[TonyV]

Well, I was thinking writing your own AuthPlugin module.  That's what we did, and it authenticates against the Titan Network user database.  You can custom-code your AuthPlugin module to work however you want, but you'd have to also write your own custom page to create and store user accounts.  That page can store whatever information you want, since you'd be defining the mechanism by which user information is stored.

There may be an easier way, though.  I still think that there may be a way to either 1) customize you account creation page, or 2) require that an account be validated by an administrator before editing is enabled.  It will be later before I can look into that, though, or if you want to, Google it and see if you can find it.  MediaWiki's site has very good documentation.

[Sekoia]

Have you browsed Mediawiki's extensions? These might be of particular interest:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:User_rights_extensions

Can't guarantee that you'll find something that'll work for you there, but it's something to look into at least.

EDIT: Actually, you should consider doing something else first: upgrade Mediawiki. According to Special:Version, you are running 1.14.0. The latest version is 1.16.2 (download from Mediawiki.org). That may help with the spam issue, since sometimes they make fixes to vulnerabilities that make spamming easy.

[TonyV]

Okay, now that I'm home, you're definitely going to read the User Rights documentation page.  It actually contains an example on the page for how to limit editing only to users with confirmed e-mail addresses, which will probably cut down on spam.  Also, there's an example of how to define an arbitrary group ("ninja") that you can assign user rights to, which would be in line with my original suggestion of manually vetting users into a group in which they can edit pages.

[Sin Stalker]

I'm curious, what would be the possibility of bringing the cohcomicindex into the titan network?

[Sin Stalker]

Or is there someone or somewhere else I should ask this?

[eabrace]

No, Tony's definitely the right person to ask. 

[TonyV]

I'm curious, what would be the possibility of bringing the cohcomicindex into the titan network?

Yeah, sorry it's taken me so long to answer.

Honestly, we're in a state of a lot of flux right now, doing some pretty major updates to existing sites and applications and in the initial planning stages of a site overhaul.  Things will probably never be calm, but I really need things to get a little clamer before considering adding more sites and/or services to the Titan Network.  I want to at least get us caught up a little better with what we've got.  I'm not saying it will never happen, but probably not within the next couple of months.

[Sin Stalker]

Understandble. Ill post again in a few months. I think the CoH comic index would be a good addition. Since you have a simi for ingame info, one for characters and groups and sic. One devoted for CoH fan made comics would be fantastic. I think we even have more info than the simi that has player characters and groups. Plus we have around a dozen City of Comic Creators who put stuff up for it and thanks to Battlerock X we have regular updates. At least one a week if not more.

If you havnt checked out the site or the features on there, the how to create your own comics stuff, please check it out sometime.  Www.cohcomicindex.com
  plus its been around for awhile now.

[BattlerockX]

Thank you Tony and Sekoia for your help on this. 

Hopefully Sin will be able to get some of the changes put in so we can shut down some of these spammers.  These bots are not stopping and as I said earlier it is getting very frustrating for me to keep checking in at all times of the day and night to block/ban them and try to catch them before they post the spam messages.

I also appreciate you at least considering including the comic wiki with the Titan Network.  I have been making every effort to include links to the Paragon Wiki where appropriate so visitors using the resource can get the in-game information in addition to the references in the various comic series, and of course we have links to the Paragon Wiki as part of the toolbox menu.

[Sin Stalker]

Hey. Checking in again.

Any update on the possibility of including the the coh comic index in the titan network? It would greatly help us deal with these spammers but also bring in more coh comic makers. Maybe even those from way back when the coh comic contest was on and so many made comics that were uploaded and then deleted by hypercomics.com when it went under.

[Sin Stalker]

bump

[BattlerockX]

bump

bump?