[kde-community] Spam attack on wikis - comments needed!

[Anne Wilson]

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On 24/07/13 09:49, Anne Wilson wrote:
> We are experiencing a severe spam attack on the wikis.  As a temporary
> measure all new registration has been blocked, while we work out the
> best way of dealing with this.
> 
> Sorry for the inconvenience. 

Over the 12 hours before the block came into effect we had ~100 new
accounts created for the sole purpose of spamming. For every one an
administrator has to find the account, find any and all linked pages,
delete them with explanation for the logs, and block the user from
posting more. This takes considerable time, as well as risking our
pages getting into blacklists.

One proposal is that we should require contributors to supply a valid
email address when registering. We acknowledge that some people don't
like to register email addresses where they may be found by others,
but that is not an issue on the wikis.

If you register your email address on any of our wikis

* It is not visible to other users
* Other contributors can (though rarely do) contact you, but only
through the wiki. They do not see your address unless you choose to
reply by email.

Now the questions:

What would be your concerns if we implemented this?

Would this stop you from registering as a contributor?

Please add any other relevant comments.

Questy captcha is very good, but the more questions you can use
randomly, the more efficient it is. Every question must have a single
obvious answer, since it is aimed at stopping machine registration,
not human ones. If you can suggest such a question, please send it to
me off-list.

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any help you can give us.

Anne
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