[Solar-talk] wiki spam

[Clay Loveless]

On Jan 28, 2007, at 3:48 AM, Rodrigo Moraes wrote:

> I have just saw this ticket about spam in Solar trac:
>
> http://solarphp.com/trac/ticket/42
>
> And indeed, the trac start page is full of hidden links. This is so
> boring. I'm afraid that the spam may cause a bad effect for our sites
> in pagerank, because they are linked together in the wiki. I've
> noticed a negative PR change recenty, maybe I'm not the only one? This
> can be related or not, anyway.

A negative PR change? What do you mean?

> In my opinion, until some time is available to find/implement a
> anti-spam protection, the trac wiki and ticket systems should be
> closed for non-registered users. Give access to the site
> administrators only, and later, with more time, accounts can be
> created for us (there are not many active users in the wiki after all,
> so I hope it won't be a lot of work). This is an immediate and extreme
> solution, but it is important for me, so please consider it.

Paul's out of town this weekend, but I'll kick it around with him.

In the meantime, a less extreme solution seems to be the following:

1. Clean up the current mess. I'm working on that right now.

2. Admins subscribe to wiki-update RSS feed from the Timeline page,  
which we should have done from the beginning. (Oops!)

3. Delete malicious changes as they're made. If the wiki appears to  
be under an automated attack, disable anonymous changes for 24-48 hours.

> Anyone here has experience fighting spam in trac?

We have the Akismet plugin for trac installed, but Akismet continues  
to underwhelm me with its effectiveness.

According to the timeline, the attack was pretty intensely focused in  
mid-October, with some action in November.

http://solarphp.com/trac/timeline?from=01%2F28% 
2F07&daysback=180&wiki=on&update=Update

... but there have only been three changes in January. So, perhaps  
either Akismet improved its filtering in recent weeks, or we're off  
the radar.

Thanks for the heads-up, Rodrigo. Let's see how things shake out from  
here.

-Clay

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