Author Topic: Lots of spambot accounts?  (Read 27683 times)

Cren

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #15: August 04, 2012, 04:39:55 PM »
I have a somewhat of a simple solution, goes along with the wiki team idea.

In order to make an account it has to be approved by a wiki Administrator, you would be encouraged to make an account in accordance with your battle master family last name or Forum name for verification before being approved.

so let the spam bots make away it'll never get approved without proper verification.

Good Idea. +1
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Foundation

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #16: August 04, 2012, 06:20:30 PM »
Seems like a lot of work for the administrator, as well as slower access time for legitimate users.  Any comments on these two aspects?
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House Talratheon

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #17: August 04, 2012, 06:46:07 PM »
Well not entirely, for pure example say a wiki account tries to register named Velax since it has to be the forum name or the family name I message him on the forums asking if it's him, he verifies then I approve the account that entire process will take more than likely less than 24 hours.

At most I e-mail him in which case it could be handled slightly above 24 hours.

It's not like account making is the Mexico/US border I wouldn't expect it to be that busy.

Foundation

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #18: August 04, 2012, 09:15:45 PM »
It's not a lot of work for the person registering, but it's a pain and an unnecessary hassle to have to wait a few days depending on the activity of the administrator to edit a wiki, especially a wiki that is not high traffic as you stated.

It is a lot of work for the administrator.  It will quickly turn to a boring and repetitive task, with no real purpose.  If they want to spend that time they might as well look for better ways to fix the spam detection or manually delete the spam accounts.

I still do not see the benefit of adding another layer of administration.  Having the players re-register on different sites (forum, game, wiki) is onerous enough.
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Indirik

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #19: August 04, 2012, 09:45:29 PM »
Tom's Bad Behavior extension blocks a ridiculous amount of wiki spam. I imagine it's the reason all those spambot accounts never manage to actually get any spam onto the wiki.
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Tom

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #20: August 04, 2012, 10:54:54 PM »
If there were a way to link the various sites... but I've tried several, even writing my own. :-(


Azerax

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #21: August 05, 2012, 02:33:31 AM »
I've been running on-line services for 15 years and in my experience the best way to combat 95% of spam bots is to simply block the /24 ip range at the firewall.

Another idea, check the referring url, if the person is signing up for an account, but the referring url is not from the wiki, it's a bot.  A few lines of php can do this.

Indirik

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #22: August 09, 2012, 05:23:34 PM »
The number of junk accounts signing up too the wiki is pretty amazing. BadBehaviour is doing an exceptional job of keeping out the edits, though. Tom, have you considered implementing the TitleBlacklist extension? A regex that forbids an account name from ending in two or more numbers would really cut down on the number of junk accounts.
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Tom

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #23: August 09, 2012, 06:35:30 PM »

Indirik

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #24: August 09, 2012, 07:13:06 PM »
Well, let's give it a day or two and see what happens. I'm not all that good with regexes.
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egamma

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #25: August 10, 2012, 06:57:23 AM »
Well, let's give it a day or two and see what happens. I'm not all that good with regexes.

I hate them...but I can do pretty well with them. Let me know if you need help.

Azerax

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #26: August 10, 2012, 03:26:45 PM »
Well, let's give it a day or two and see what happens. I'm not all that good with regexes.

This will match only the last 2 digits if they are numbers:

/[0-9]{2}$/

So it may look like this:
Code: [Select]
$username="fish23";

if (preg_match_all('/[0-9]{2}$/i', $username, $result)==1)
{
echo "Match found";
}
else
{
echo "no match found";
}

Indirik

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #27: August 10, 2012, 03:32:43 PM »
What I was thinking may be useful would be for the string to match if the username ends in two or more numbers. Not exactly two, but two or more.


I've also included the public blacklist here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Title_blacklist

Does that mean that the regexes on the wikimedia page will also be used by our wiki?
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Anaris

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #28: August 10, 2012, 03:34:46 PM »
in that case, /[0-9][0-9]+$/i should do the trick.
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Tom

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Re: Lots of spambot accounts?
« Reply #29: August 10, 2012, 03:46:43 PM »
Does that mean that the regexes on the wikimedia page will also be used by our wiki?

Yes. We're not the only wiki getting spams, so why not profit from other peoples' experiences?