Appropedia:Anti-spam and anti-vandalism: Difference between revisions

The most effective anti-vandalism measure is an active community. We have a team of people (the Recent Changes Patrol monitoring all edits made, and vandalism and spam are quickly reverted.

We are also looking at other measures such as bots (as used with great efficiency at Wikipedia) to monitor and quickly revert vandalism.

See also the talk page, for further discussion.

Settings

Restricting permissions for page moves

Page moves are harder to revert than other changes, so we added this to our LocalSettings.php:

# To thwart vandalism these adjustments (intended)
# to limit move permission to "autoconfirmed" users
$wgAutoConfirmAge                             = 3600*24*10; // 10 days
$wgAutoConfirmCount                           = 10; // 10 edits required
$wgGroupPermissions['user']['move']           = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['autoconfirmed']['move']  = true;

(Note: the variables are linked to relevant resources, above, but you can ignore that in LocalSettings.php and just paste in plain text.)

Suggestions

• implement a bot or bots taken (with permission) from Wikipedia spam & vandal-fighters. E.g. Tawkerbot.^W These could run on the server, for faster, 24-hour operation.
• ban page creation by anons & new accounts (like Wikipedia) - On Appropedia, it is likely that some readers will never sign up until they are ready to create a page based on their project.
• implement soft-protection for pages that are spam targets
• reverse Turing tests
  • Currently implemented in some cases.
• Implementing the semi-protection^W function [DONE - this option is now available to admins], to use when existing, legitimate pages become repeat targets for negative behavior of any kind. For technical details, see:
  • mw:Manual:Administrators#Protection
  • mw:Manual:$wgRestrictionLevels
  • mw:Manual:$wgRestrictionTypes

Extensions

• We have a simple CAPTCHA: mw:Extension:ConfirmEdit - a minor bother to users, but it has stopped the "nonsense bots." Only needs to be set for anon editors, and for account creation. (Any stricter is unneeded, and is a nuisance for contributors.)
• We have MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist and MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist via the extension - mw:Extension:SpamBlacklist.
• We have (the currently unused) MediaWiki:Titleblacklist and MediaWiki:Titlewhitelist from mw:Extension:Title_Blacklist.
• Bad Behavior blocks a lot of spam without bothering users, by examining how an editor accesses the site. See Bad Behavior on MediaWiki (official site) and mw:Extension:Bad Behavior. (The official site has up to date info and the MediaWiki.org page may have other useful info. (See also Bad Behavior 2 Extended - additional add-on for MediaWiki which adds a special page for Bad Behavior.)

Patterns

Patterns of spam (e.g. particular forms of url, HTML markup, or words) can be noted on the patterns subpage. This can then be used to tighten our spam url blacklist and AbuseFilter settings.

Patterns in pagenames can be blocked too - admins can edit these patterns at MediaWiki:Titleblacklist.

See also

• Appropedia:Recent changes patrol

Interwiki links

• meta:Anti-vandalism ideas
• Wikipedia:Project:Bot policy
• Wikipedia:Project:Spam
• How Wikipedia stops the nonsense bots - discussion thread on Wikipedia's Village Pump.
• Wikipedia:Project:Vandalism - and note the See also links at the bottom.
• Wikipedia:User:Lupin/Filter recent changes
• meta:Vandalbot - a script which automatically performs some kind of malicious edit or similar operation to a wiki at high rate.
• Interview with member of Wikipedia's WikiProject Spam - note the question about tools.
• mw:Manual:User rights
• mw:Manual:User rights management
• mw:Manual:Preventing access