Wiki Anti Spam

This is aimed at you guys (you know who you are) that read the wiki change messages... We're still getting too many spam edits here. I've just purged out the user list and the list of pages to completely kill all the old spams (hopefully I haven't killed any useful pages or users by mistake), and upgraded the wiki software to be current, but theres nothing suggesting things will get better. One measure I could take is adding TextCHAs - see http://moinmo.in/HelpOnTextChas but that:-

• Requires us to come up with a list of appropriate Q/A sets
• Raises the barrier for real users, especially those that do not have english as a first language

Would appreciate comments on this.

* On the MusicBrainz (moin) wiki we basically require authentication for "write" operations, and we freely publish the credentials for authenticating (user "mbwiki", pass "mbwiki"). Therefore people who are just browsing see no difference, people who are editing for real have to fill in the login box when it pops up (but they can tell their browser to remember the user/pass), and spam robots don't realise how to log in. YYMV; it works for us. Implementation: a handful of RewriteRules and a tiny CGI wrapper. See http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/WikiSpamProtection for more. - DaveEvans

* Errr.... you seem to have zapped the FrontPage.

• Ooops :-/ Now restored. And a few other pages. I missed that because it aggressively caches stuff

* Also lots of FAQ categories seem to be empty now, I suspect they weren't before - DaveEvans

• I think thats down to changes in how moin handles things in 1.6+

New suggestion - have a look at http://moinmo.in/RussellStuart/EmailActivation - it won't work with 1.7.2 at the moment, but its being worked on.