I thought I'd look for mediawiki extensions that might help with the spam situation.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamBlacklist looks reasonably useful, except that there does not seem to be any particular consistency in the links we are getting in spam at the moment.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SimpleAntiSpam looks like it could be useful - if the spam edits are mostly robots. I'm assuming they are

A couple of other things we could do would be to limit the number of letters in the usernames in the spamfilter.

I will add other stuff here if/when I find any. Joeturner 01:19, 8 March 2013 (PST)

I also notice that spam usernames are often 9 letters long. I wonder if we should prevent new usernames being exactly 9 letters long.. Joeturner 03:28, 8 March 2013 (PST)

Thanks for the suggestions. This should have been fixed by now, but we've had hiccups with our upgrade, and are back to looking for a suitable lead developer who is very reliable, knows MediaWiki very well and as much as possible knows Semantic MediaWiki. (We had a good one but he became unavailable.)
We do have blacklists, which admins (such as you) can edit. See MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist, MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist and MediaWiki:Usernameblacklist.
We have SimpleAntiSpam - see Special:Version for all our extensions & settings. I wonder if it could be tweaked, especially for the registration page, which is where our biggest problem is. We need a PHP programmer for that.
We also have the very flexible AbuseFilter (which stops a lot of spam here but I haven't set it up to filter registrations). I could probably use it to recognize certain patterns such as length of username (well spotted, thanks) and put up an "Are you sure?" screen. That's usually enough to stop a spam bot. I can do that pronto. --Chriswaterguy 12:01, 22 May 2013 (PDT)

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