Re: spam on the wiki

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2012/1/17 Joanna Cheng <address@hidden>:
> 2012/1/16 Carnë Draug <address@hidden>:
>>
>> I like the idea of making a simple question. For example, Ubuntu
>> forums force people to answer a question (such, "how much is 2+2"
>> or, "what's the color of an orange") before making a search, and I
>> remember seeing a question on savannah site about the number 1984
>> (the question was what was the name of George Orwell book that is
>> an year). A simple question about octave seems to me the best way.

> jwe said he was too busy atm with other things for wiki settings;
> maybe we can revisit this when he has some time. I've been told this
> (having to answer a question) works okay on savannah -- no spammy
> bug postings. But the wiki (sepcifically, the mediawiki platform) is
> targetted a lot more heavily by spam bots, or maybe spam users.
> Computer OCR is already pretty good so but I suspect it would be
> thwarted by something very context dependent, so even if the
> question is easily read by a computer, the answer is not so obvious
> without the contextual information. But I guess we can test it out.

I really like the idea of a simple question. I was thinking of
something alone the lines "run this code in Octave, what's the
answer?" which would be pretty easy to implement, from the looks of
other Mediawiki anti-spam plugins I've seen.

But I say we try something simpler first, e.g. "what's the cosine of
pi?" or something like that.

I'll write the antispam plugin based on some of the ones I've seen and
we can try it out. I get the feeling we're getting more spam than what
is comfortable.

- Jordi G. H.