[ILUG] Re: wiki software

[Rory Browne]

On 5/22/05, Lee Hosty <hostyle at csn.ul.ie> wrote:
> Rory Browne wrote:
> >>>My point was that login accounts aren't the only protection against
> >>>spambots, and they aren't necessarly the best.
> >>
> >>Without them, my experience is that you're overwhelmed.  (As mentioned,
> >>you may enjoy a fool's paradise of some months' duration until the bots
> >>all find you, but then you get clobbered.)
> >
> > That few months may be all we need to accumulate the momentum of being
> > a sufficient size that users will be willing to jump through the hoops
> > that they wouldn't have been willing to jump through for a small
> > five-page wiki.
> 
> What few months? I have administered a few wikis over the last couple of
> years. If google can find you - the wiki spam bots will be there within
> a matter of hours, and call back every couple of hours from random IP
> addresses. Open Wikis were a great idea a year ago and longer. Today
> there is no way they will survive without constant moderation /
> administration.
> 
> Some wikis have blacklisting and limited spam detection (MoinMoin IIRC),
> but I've yet to see any sort of small public wiki survive more than a
> month of spamming without going login-only or collapse comepletely. The
> main problem with wikis is that they are such a low hanging fruit fo
> spammers. Its trivial to write a Perl script using WWW:Mechanize to
> search google for wiki-specific content, and auto-submit to every page
> found.

How many of those wikis implemented other protective measures, such as
the captcha, or fed the content through a spam filter. I'm not
arguing. Just curious.