Tue, 22 Apr 2008
Mediawiki antispam: SpamBlacklist
I end up maintaining a bunch of MediaWiki wikis. So far, here is what I do to keep them low in spam, high in ham.
Note that I have a bias to wanting to accept anonymous edits.
Use SpamBlacklist
Wikimedia maintains a list of bad domains that are linked-to by spammers. The famous chongqed.org maintains a similar list. The SpamBlacklist extension prevents saves with URLs that match patterns listed in a blacklist. Blocking this way is important, even if anonymous edits are disallowed, because many bots seem to register for accounts. Blocking this way is important, even if CAPTCHAs are enabled, because there seem to be spammers who sit at their computers and spam (or alternately who solve CAPTCHAs and then let their bots run (not that I've ever done that....)).
To use it, just:
- Check it out of their svn
- Configure a cron job to get the Chongqed and MW blacklists locally, and configure $wgSpamBlacklistFiles as appropriate.
- Don't forget to read the official docs.
- Caution: The Chongqed list blocks lots of .edu domains. I "grep -v" them out.
