[spam-stopper] MediaWiki spam fight discussion. Fighting distributors of spamming software.

[Ben Hansen]

you'd think that with the penguin updates this kind of spamming would go away since its all basically worthless now. i guess some people are still stuck in the past and able to sell these “services” to unsuspecting customers :/

I'm all for taking the fight to their doorsteps, just not sure how you do that in a broad sense without breaking laws or doing ethically questionable things. i suppose one good place to start would be to find a better way to identify, report and offline the bot nets or the hacked servers themselves since a lot of the activity seems to be originating from those kinds of sources. One would have to believe that finding some way to cloud/crowd source that would be ideal (fight bots with bots;).

FYI i believe akismet has an API that can be used with various CMS systems including mediawiki maybe these links will help you in your specific situation:

http://akismet.com/development/
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AkismetKlik

i would not personally recommend any of the solutions that employ IP blocking mentioned in the thread you linked, that’s basically a game of whack-a-mole which can actually serve to ban legitimate users into the future every time you knock out a mole from visiting your site because a lot of the ip’s in question are either dynamic or would only ever hit a particular site once.

i was think of making a youtube video about how to report email spammers. i figure that could be popular with a large number “regular” users and might have the added benefit of knocking out these same servers generating web spam if enough people started doing it.

that’s my 2 cents for what they are worth.

On May 25, 2013, at 11:31 AM, halz wrote:

> I kicked off a discussion over on the MediaWiki mailing list about spammers and spam fighting:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2013-May/041196.html
> 
> There's a full thread of discussion there, although some of it wont be relevant to blog spam, but my original point was...  could we take the fight a bit closer to the doorsteps of the spammers? Could we attack back at distributors of tools like 'SENuke Xcr' and 'Ultimate Demon'?
> 
> Halz
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