From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2004-09-29T11:23:18+09:00
Subject: Re: RubyGarden Spam

I wrote:
> > I'm approaching it, again, from a slightly different perspective. My
> > goal is to make the page seem as if it were entirely a read-only
> > website to robots, and 403 if they are known bad crawlers. I don't yet
> > have IP banning, but I have robot exclusion.

Patrick May:
> Read-only to robots makes sense as a way of preventing accidental
> problems.  I used to have a delete link on the wiki.  All my pages kept
> getting deleted.  I guessed that it was a robot gone amuck [1] .  I
> also like the bit about recognizing bad crawlers.  No harvesting for
> old fashioned spam is a good thing.
> 
> The thing about banning is that it is easy for the vandal to tell that
> they have been detected.  I tried using Apache Deny directives to
> manage abuse, but sometimes that just encourages the vandal to switch
> computers.  Plus the cost of a false positive is denial of service.
> After one particularly annoying episode, I realized that the vandal was
> trying to waste my time.  So I setup the tarpit system to waste his,
> and haven't lost sleep since.
> 
> I still do alot of cleanup on my wikis, and I still use Deny
> directives.  Nothing replaces an active administrator.  The tarpit just
> gave me another lever to help me manage the problem.

As of right now, a tarpit would actually be a little too difficult to
implement in Ruwiki. It's much easier to present the wiki as if it
were a CMS or a read-only website.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
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