MediaWiki Administrator's Handbook/Spam and Spammers
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On wikimedia wikis, spamming is the addition of unwelcome commercial links and/or language, either added to already existing pages, or added as an entire page.
The various projects have vast differences in what is defined as spamming, and what to do about it.
Contents |
[edit] Extension:ConfirmEdit
The most common way to protect your wiki from spam is to use ConfirmEdit extension. Extension:ConfirmEdit offers several variants of capchas:
[edit] SimpleCaptcha
SimpleCapcha is the default capcha in ConfirmEdit. This captcha offers user to solve a simple math to prove that they are not spam bots:
SimpleCapcha can be easealy bypased by simple script, so it is recommended to use more complex capchas.
[edit] FancyCaptcha
FancyCaptcha is a traditional graphic captcha, that offers user to type letters that appear in the picture:
To create captcha's images you will need to run python script. But you will not need python on your web-server to use this captcha, you may create images on your desktop, for example, and just copy them to your wiki web-server.
[edit] MathCaptcha
MathCaptcha is another captcha mechanism for ConfirmEdit. To run it you will require to enable TeX support within your MediaWiki.
[edit] ConfirmEdit Notes
Note that ConfirmEdit is quite sensitive to version mismatch. Last version of ConfirmEdit should work well with last version of MedaiWiki. But if you want to use ConfirmEdit with a legacy version of MedaiWiki, you might spend a lot of time looking for matching version of ConfirmEdit in SVN repository. Some version matches is mentioned on the extention home page but not all of them.
[edit] Extension:ReCAPTCHA
ReCAPTCHA is another one captcha extension for Media wiki. It offers strong visual and audio capchas.
