"Jeff Garland" <jeff@crystalclearsoftware.com> wrote in message news:20050908014237.M29002@crystalclearsoftware.com...
In general my goal has been to put as few human usability barriers in the way of using the wiki while being able to shut out spammers after the first incident and quickly recover all spammed pages. So far it's been working well. In a more typical week we get about 3 spammers changing 1-2 pages per incident. These look like they are done by hand and hence CAPTCHA would do nothing to stop these. I've also resisted calls for registration as I'm fully convinced that people smart enough to run bots to spam from 50 different IP addresses will simply register to work around that barrier. And, one of the bots was also smart enough to meter it's pace to work around 'throttling' traps. So I don't put it past some of these guys to find a way around CAPTCHA too. In the end, the critical thing is the backup -- no matter how bad the spam, things can be restored easily...
Jeff
I agree with most of what you said. However, putting at least mild spam prevention including searching message content for multiple links outside of the Wiki will at least control automated spamming. Also, some human spammers may just realize it isn't worth the effort and move on to another wiki site. Mike