From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2004-09-28T21:48:35+09:00
Subject: RubyGarden Spam

Robert McGovern wrote:
>
> > I've got a list, but it has become obvious that maintaining a list
> > manually isn't going to work.  I'm tempted to require registration and
> > authentication at this point as much as I hate the thought.
>
> I'd certainly be against it, I know spam is a bad thing and indeed my
> own wiki has had it from time to time but requiring authentication /
> registration removes a freedom from people they shouldn't have to give
> up and might indeed push people away from using it.

It certainly would be tolerable if a wiki is only spammed from time-to-time.
I have five project wikis on RubyForge, and I have to go clean up the spam
*every* day. This is more than troublesome, it is beginning to make wikis
unusable.

Austin Zeigler is adding authentication to Ruwiki, and Tom Copeland is going
to tie that into the RubyForge. So once all this is in place, the default
RubyForge wiki will be Ruwiki and a single login to RubyForge will suffice
for all normal RubyForge activities *as well as* all RubyForge hosted wikis.

This will help, but obviously won't be the final answer. At least we will
have a wiki written in Ruby, maintained by someone in our own community,
where we can react intelligently to the ever-changing spam threats.

Curt

> Also there is nothing to stop spammers from setting up a ton of "junk"
> accounts to get around it. This has happened a lot on Yahoo Groups and
> the group we are in basically decided that new users (for a period of
> a couple of weeks) has to have their posts moderated. This was to
> prevent general spam and job solicitations. I can't think of a way to
> make that sort of scheme work in a Wiki environment though.
>
> Rob
>
> --
> Personal responsibility is battling extinction.