[Lilug Planning] wiki account creation

[Jesse Farinacci]

Greetings,

I think that your suggestion is a good one. I wonder if this is
related to the rash of bounces to the mail server, with about a
hundred @latino addresses. I don't want to create more work for you,
but perhaps you would be willing to generate a report which shows page
activity? With and without spam changes? I suspect that the Wiki is
fairly unused, and if that is the case, we'd be better served with
static pages (possibly gh-pages)...

Thanks for dealing with this crap, Mark,
-Jesse

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 10:03 AM, Mark Drago <markdrago at gmail.com> wrote:
> While the captchas that were added to the wiki were helpful in cutting
> down the spam it did not eliminate it entirely.  To get a sense of the
> size of the problem, you could take a look at the list of accounts
> which have been blocked:
> http://lilug.org/w/index.php?title=Special:BlockList&limit=100 .  In
> order to avoid ever having spam on our wiki (and to avoid having to
> spend time cleaning it up), I added the ConfirmAccount extension to
> our mediawiki instance this morning.  This means that when someone
> wants to create an account they have to verify their email address and
> after it is verified their request must be accepted by a
> sysop/bureaucrat (administrator in mediawiki-speak).  Honestly, I
> don't even expect spam account requests to come through, because our
> account creation is now not the standard mediawiki account creation.
> However, if a spam account creation request does come through the
> admin can simply ignore it and it gets forgotten in 2 weeks.  If it is
> not a spam request the admin can accept it and the user gets their
> account.
>
> An email is sent out after an account requester verifies their email
> address.  Currently those emails are going to me.  They don't have to
> and I'm open to discussing who they should go to or if they should go
> to a list or something.
>
> I just did (hopefully) the final cleanup of any remaining spam content
> and user accounts on the lilug wiki.  There were 3 accounts that were
> created in the past few weeks which didn't create any content (so I
> can't verify that they're spam) and which I left active.  These
> accounts are cecil, edwardddowlingiv, and torpidbest1.  I know for a
> fact that edwarddownling has been attending meetings recently.  I
> don't know about cecil, and honestly torpidbest1 sounds kind of
> spammish.  If any spam content is created by these accounts I will
> clean it up and block the account.

-- 
There are 10 types of people in this world, those
that can read binary and those that can not.