FWIW, I just checked what the RationalWiki IP-edit captcha does: we’re using QuestyCaptcha, which asks “What is the nth letter of our name under the logo?” (said name being of course “RationalWiki”) - and this (a) utterly confuses the spambots (b) doesn’t hamper accessibility.
Edit: Although of late we have a vandalbot written specially for us, which hops from open proxy to open proxy. So an arms race over the questions would be laborious - thinking of good new quesitions is slower than telling your bot how to deal with them—and our work is to find what proxy list he’s using and inform the blackhole list operators of it.
MediaWiki captchas are terrible and literally worse than useless (keep many humans out, fail to keep spambots out). reCaptcha is a little less worse. But if they have something that works for wiki spam, please be sure to post it to mediawiki-l! Thank you :-)
Protecting one specific Wiki from spam and protecting Wiki’s in general from spam are two different problems. Spam security by obscurity works for a single Wiki.
Trike Apps is also working on a solution for the LW wiki spam, since captchas have not been sufficient.
FWIW, I just checked what the RationalWiki IP-edit captcha does: we’re using QuestyCaptcha, which asks “What is the nth letter of our name under the logo?” (said name being of course “RationalWiki”) - and this (a) utterly confuses the spambots (b) doesn’t hamper accessibility.
Edit: Although of late we have a vandalbot written specially for us, which hops from open proxy to open proxy. So an arms race over the questions would be laborious - thinking of good new quesitions is slower than telling your bot how to deal with them—and our work is to find what proxy list he’s using and inform the blackhole list operators of it.
Thanks, I’ve passed this to Trike.
MediaWiki captchas are terrible and literally worse than useless (keep many humans out, fail to keep spambots out). reCaptcha is a little less worse. But if they have something that works for wiki spam, please be sure to post it to mediawiki-l! Thank you :-)
Protecting one specific Wiki from spam and protecting Wiki’s in general from spam are two different problems. Spam security by obscurity works for a single Wiki.