Re: coordinated spam attack on wikicreole.org and jspwiki.org

Chuck Smith wrote:

> Last evening and this morning we suffered from a robot editing dozens
> of pages on WikiCreole and I just noticed they are hitting jspwiki.org
> as well.  They are each from a different IP and sometimes it would
> also make multiple edits so that a simple rollback would not be
> possible.  They would simply add a few random characters to the
> beginning of each page they hit.

Like that
http://www.wikicreole.org/Diff.jsp?page=People&r1=63&r2=62
(first line)?- Seems the bot doesn't handle encoding too well, too ;).

Anyone got an idea how to handle this properly? What is the purpose of 
adding this gibberish anyways?

The problem with this is that while with proper countermeasures (e.g., 
captchas on adding external links) actual spam doesn't get through, but 
since these edits do not add external links, this mechanism doesn't 
work. Changes can get reverted quickly but in the course page history, 
RSS and other notification mechanisms get polluted, annoying users that 
subscribed to changes :-(.

Requiring login is no option since this defeats the wiki idea in my 
opinion. Captchas on every edit should solve the problem but are not too 
nice either.

Regards