New User Flood
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There seems to be a flood of new users, I can only guess that these are not people interested in robocode, but rather some kind of spam bot (or spam bots). We need some way to captcha user creation I think.
While we are at it, remove some of those "new users" without any edits.
Well a few, for example I don't have access to actual site stuff (so I can't add a captcha).
We could just go through and manually delete them all, but there is no bulk method way to do that (that I know of).
List of those with mediawiki "administrator" access:
AW, Chase-san, Darkcanuck, David Alves, GrubbmGait, Jdev, MN, PEZ, Rednaxela, Sheldor, Skilgannon, Skotty, Voidious, Wompi
List of those with server shell access:
David Alves, Rednaxela, Skilgannon, Voidious
The one whose name the server name is under:
David Alves
The one whose name the domain name is under:
PEZ
The last several times the server needed config maintnance I've dealt with that. I know Skilgannon is also checking in wiki sometimes. Voidious less often recently to my knowledge.
For future reference, you can see who's a wiki administrator or bureaucrat by using the "Group:" filter on the user list page.
Hate to break it to you Chase, but we already have a captcha on user creation. In fact, we have *TWO* captchas (reCaptcha, plus a simple math question presented as an image) required for user creation, and the bots involved in these user creations seem to crack crack both. I tend to wonder if they're using a "mechanical turk" type of system to outsource bulk captcha breaking to humans.
Only reason they very rarely succeed at actually posting content these days, is because of a custom Mediawiki extension I added, which blocks any edits which add new external URL links if the user account was created within X hours of the attempt. (Note, it does not block external URLs that are not formatted as Mediawiki links, such as the participants page of course)
Perhaps I should augment this extension to remove users whose only attempted edits during a 1 week period were blocked in this fashion?
My experience with captcha locked registration, is that at some point someone, most likely a human, provides an answer to at least one question. After this bots will register like crazy. On my site I had non googlable question, which holds bots for a month or two, but sooner or letter they will come.
The only way to deal with it, is to remove old questions and generate new ones.
"Perhaps I should augment this extension to remove users whose only attempted edits during a 1 week period were blocked in this fashion?"
That policy sounds pretty reasonable, as long as it is clearly written somewhere new users would see.
Actually, now that I think about it. I think Voidious used Asirra to prevent issues on the berrybots wiki. Now asirra is closing down this year, so we can't use that. But there should be some other image based captcha's around.
As we all know, classification is a very difficult AI problem, but is almost trivial for us humans. :)
Usually, it is sufficient to ask what is "2+2", may be in the form "two plus two" so it is not that obvious for a parser. Since, we are fighting attacks not designed against this particular wiki, it will be sufficient. Once, a traitor give the answer to this question to a bot net, we will ask what is 2+3, and so on.
