MediaWiki/fighting spam

This page relates to fighting spam postings, otherwise known as wikispam, in MediaWiki.

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Notes

It looks like there are basically two methods for preventing spam. Both of them match submitted edits against a regex string, and reject those which fail the test. One method is built in and allows only a single regex string; the other requires an extension ("ambiguously licensed") and allows blacklist data to be pulled from remote sites.

Links

• MediaWiki documentation
  • Anti-spam features: simple built-in regex blacklist
  • SpamBlacklist extension: more powerful than the built-in regex blacklist. The README file explains most of it, but doesn't make it clear that there are two files you need to install: SpamBlacklist.php and SpamBlacklist_body.php
    • Please feel free to make use of the spam blacklist on HypertWiki