Another open system bites the dust.
Well, maybe I am caving in a bit to the wiki url spammers but as it is the sites we set up are completely useless wikis as they pile up with pages of links to URLs with names so horrific I get a slimy feeling just reading them.
Thanks to the roach spewing crap, it was the 163 nasty URLS at a time from gprs-232-69.scs-900.ru that tossed me over the edge, our wikis are now READ-ONLY, and we have set up editor passwords that will allow the people we wish to participate to edit our sites. Sadly for UseMod, this is applied wiki-wide. I am shopping for some wiki software to implement down the road that will hopefully offer more page level permissions.
I did play with my own UseMod hack that would provide a configurable threshold number of URLs that could be posted in one swoop… it did work fine, but even that was not worth the effort.
Maybe a gated wiki is only a half wiki, but a wiki full of things like “beastiality-horse-sex” is DOA. If anyone wants the pleasure of the 163 nasty URLs… well, I have them in a greasy paper sack under a pile of rotten fruit.
And so far, nary a roach has stepped up to proclaim their identity to me. No big surprise at all.
Since most of these wiki attacks are automated, how about the simple alternative of putting the password in text on the front page– or on every page of the site in the header or footer or something? Just plain text that says: to edit use the password ‘spammersbiteme’ … Or a javascript popup box when one tries to submit that gives the password? I imagine that this could be automated in all kinds of ways to change passwords every week/day/etc …
Alan – Suggestion: Choose different wiki software. Choose a package that allows user admin and creation of groups.
This does not defeat the purpose of a wiki. It does defeat spammers, which BTW, are here to stay.