From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2004-10-25T03:24:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Garden Spam

Jim Weirich wrote:
> 
> On Sunday 24 October 2004 09:36 am, trans.  (T. Onoma) wrote:
> > I agree and CAPTCHA was my first suggestion. But the general 
> take seemed to
> > be against it, siting reasons of use and implementation, and 
> that spammers
> > would just find a way around it. I'm not so sure about these points, but
> > nonetheless pre-moderating pages with new external links is 
> simple enough
> > and 100% effective.
> 
> I am trying an experiment on my wikis (UseMod based) where I require all 
> external links to be written HTTP://host/yada rather than 
> http://host/yada.  
> Any page with a lower case http link is rejected (with a message 
> directing 
> the user to an explaination).  The patch to usemod effected only 
> a few lines 
> of code.  And although the measure is simple to circumvent, it 
> has cut down 
> spam on my wikis to about one incident a week.  I believe Tom has 
> implemented 
> this patch on some (all?) the rubyforge project wikis with some 
> success as 
> well.

Tom has implemented this for at least 5 of the RubyForge projects in which I am involved. It has had a 100% successes rate in stopping the spam (so far). This is a temporary measure until we switch over to Ruwiki for RubyForge. 

Austin is adding authentication to Ruwiki and Tom is integrating that into RubyForge's login, so you'll have to be logged-in to RubyForge to edit pages.

Curt