Re: [wiki] fake account spam

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Thu, 25 Apr 2013, Sietse Brouwer wrote:

> We're getting 3-12 new accounts created per day. If nothing else,
> they're cluttering up the recent changes list.
>
> I think it's a good idea to update the security questions --- it's
> easy to do, it'll probably work, and we can always move on to stronger
> measures that require more work. Below are some replacemetn questions.
>
> * If you have a log of which questions get answered correctly,
> perhaps only rotate out the bad question(s);
> * If finding the cracked questions is nontrivial (i.e. more work than
> 'just open the log file and see which ones get answered every day'),
> just replace them all.
>
> If this works, hooray; if it stops working, we can either change the
> questions again (if the spammers took long to get through) or move on
> to e.g. the ConfirmAccount extension [1,2] (if the questions got
> cracked quickly, so we are getting 'human' attention from the spammer
> instead of his bots).

Confirm account means that a new user will not be able to quickly correct 
typos etc. Isn't there a simple way to add a captcha to mediawiki. I am 
not a big fan of Captchas, but the are the de facto standard for human 
verification. A user only has to do it once, so it is not too big of an 
annoyance either.

Aditya
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