Contents
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Old, pre-MoinMoin discussion
The following discussion took place before the wiki was moved to MoinMoin.
We now have tools for removing spam completely from this site. You do not need to save a previous revision over the spammed page. This only makes the process slightly harder for the admins.
If you want to take action, just put the word "spammed" at the top, so we can search for that. We'll still scrutinize each page for false positives.
Now, if the spammer has actually messed up the content, and not simply added links, you should revert the page to the good content, but still add the word "spammed" or "spammed - revision #123" to the top.
Update: MoinMoin has a content filtering system that will control most spam. You can document here if pages are spammed, but it should not happen anymore. -- TheAnarcat 2006-05-15 02:03:01
Major Spam Problem
Introduction
You probably noticed the influx of spam within this wiki. Deleting the spam pages as they appear is already a nuisance. But I just figured out something that makes it worthwhile for spammers to come back again and again... even if their pages get deleted quickly. AugustinMa 5th Oct. 2007
read CategorySpam to learn more about spam under moinmoin wiki. especially, BadContent should be updated by wiki admin. FranklinPiat
Thanks for the link. It is very useful. The problem is that we don't know who the ?DebianWikiAdministrators are. The page ?DebianWikiAdministrators should be updated with the correct information precisely so that we can deal with cases like this. BadContent needs to be updated. Since we suffer a lot from communist Chinese spam, and I understand Chinese, I could update the BadContent page should I be given the rights to do it. Whom should I contact about this???? -- AugustinMa 2007-10-09 06:52:35
Registration procedure
The registration procedure of MoinMoin is too simple. There is not even an email verification making it very easy for spammers to register. A particular spammer has been active for a few weeks and only increments his account name when needed: so, we've had spam from caicaimm, caicaimm2, caicaimm3, caicaimm4, caicaimm5, ... and the latest incarnation as I write this is caicaimm16. Having registration process where the email is verified before the first login would dramatically cut on this kind of spammers. AugustinMa 5th Oct. 2007
Incentive for spammers : search engine indexation
Usually, the spam pages get deleted very quickly.
Even though deleted pages are still accessible to humans 1, search engines won't index those pages because the page is marked with <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">. -- FranklinPiat 2007-10-05 07:37:33
Solution
I don't know the administrative options of MoinMoin.
- Is there a way to have an email verification procedure before users can login?
alternatively, we could use Captcha
in fact, TextCha has been implemented in 1.6 MoinMoin Version.
Any plans to upgrade ? -- ?AnneGoldenbergThis wiki is running DebianStable's !Moinmoin. The wiki will be upgraded when the server will be upgraded to lenny (i.e probably a few month after Lenny is released). -- FranklinPiat
I have found this patch to enable email verification: http://moinmo.in/RussellStuart/EmailActivation, maybe it's worth looking at it. -- EricVeirasGalisson
Is it possible to hide the Info pages from unregistered users (i.e. indexing bots)? -- AugustinMa 5th Oct. 2007
Standard compliant robots are being told not to index special pages using <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> (read more (this include info page, page history, moinmoin's system pages...). -- FranklinPiat 2007-10-05 07:37:33
Log out from the wiki, got to the RecentChanges, go to the last deleted spam, click on Get Info, and click on Action > View (1)