Dear brted, here are some anti-spam ideas for the Flashlight Wiki

Off-topic Chatter
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Hi brted,

Thanks again for continuing to run and update the Flashlight Wiki.

If you made it easier for people to edit the wiki, then more people would do so.

Having to send an email or PM surely discourages people from editing.

The MediaWiki wiki writes that locking down a wiki “does reduce spam, but it is a poor solution […] because you are introducing something which massively inconveniences real users [and is] […] a big turn off for many people.”

1. Would pending changes level 1 protection be sufficient to stop most spam ?

2. If not, then how about requiring automatic MediaWiki e-mail verification before a new user can edit ?

3. Or disabling ordinary account creation and switching to OpenID instead ?

4. Or, as finnw suggests, forcing spammers to spam as easily-blockable IP users ?

Single-mode 105c
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Thanks for your contributions to the Flashlight Wiki, unforgettableid! I appreciate the work you have been doing. Having run the wiki for a couple of years now, I can say pretty confidently that there is not a huge pent up demand for people to work on the wiki. At the CPF wiki, I was pretty much the only one making changes. Once I started Flashlight Wiki, I was still the only one, with very rare exceptions. Maybe 20-40 legitimate users have signed up. And maybe 5 have made changes. And you’re the only one who has come back to make more edits. However, the great thing is that the wiki gets about 1,000 visitors every day, and I’m glad that people find it useful.

I wrote out more, but I don’t want to bore people. Basically Captchas aren’t that effective, I still get bogus account signups, even with Captchas. Email verification definitely doesn’t work. And once I approve a user, they never have to pass another test to edit all they want to. I don’t have a team of administrators to keep spammers in check, and I don’t want to waste my time. I also don’t want to have to pass a Captcha in order to edit an article or add a link. One Captcha, one email. That just can’t be too much for people to handle.

A little later . . .

In thinking about this a little more, I changed the new user setup so that it asks you for your email. I didn’t want to intrude, but by not asking for email, I realize there is no way for a user to recover their password if they forget it. And since most people probably don’t log in that often, they are likely to forget at some point. If you have an account already and want to add an email you can do this in the preferences tab (once you are logged in). If you’ve got an account and forgotten your password, I can probably reset it for you if you let me know. I’m pretty sure I can’t see anyone’s password, so I can’t tell you what it is.

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Oh. :frowning: And there are tons of CPF users who could’ve edited the wiki. And you’re saying they didn’t.

So I guess you’re correct: I guess there really is no pent-up demand to edit the wiki.

Thanks for replying.