[Catalyst] Wiki spam

[Octavian Rasnita]

From: "Matt S Trout" <dbix-class at trout.me.uk>
> Can you suggest an accessible equivalent that works?
>
> I mean, I'm aware of stuff like audio captchas. But I have no viewpoint to
> judge whether they're any use or not. You do.
>
> I want to piss the spammers off (that bit I can do :) but not screw over
the
> people who need a screen reader (that bit I'm, erm, incapable of knowing
> about, pretty much). As somebody with first-hand experience, can you
provide a
> recommendation?
>

Hi,

Yes an "audio" captcha is really helpful, but only if it works. In many
cases the sites just want to show that they care, but those systems don't
work at all.

Some other good ideas for preventing spam were presented by other list
members. SPAM can mean more things, so if you want to be sure that nobody
will post direct links to spam pages forgetting a higher rank in search
engines, you can do a few things:

- Create a list with valid domains and allow external links only to those
domains.

- If someone will post a link to another domain, then the message could
appear, but the link will be commented out, or have rel="nofollow", or have
the url temporary modified like href="[your_server/program_name/][url
inserted by the visitor]" so a program on your site will just print a
message telling that the page is not available or something else, or it can
make a redirect if you want...
Or you could replace the href with href="#" and add a Javascript
onClick="..." and if someone will use a browser and want to click on that
spam link, it will work, but the search engines won't index that site.

- All those links will appear automaticly in a certain list and an
administrator can review it periodically, and just need to approve or reject
them deleting the link only or the entire message, and if the admin will see
more links to a certain external domain, he could push a button and add that
domain to the list of allowed domain names, so the next time someone will
post a link to that domain, it will be approved automaticly.

- Another idea is to put a simple text box as someone suggested, and the
visitors should enter a text in it before beeing able to post something. You
can even put the visitors to write the result of a certain simple math
operation like:
"Write the result of 3 * 4", and those numbers can be generated randomly.

If you want the search engines to index the web pages, but don't want to
allow the spammers get the email addresses, it is not possible because if
the search engines are able to get them, the spammers will also be able to
do it. You could do some things for making harder this, for example
replacing  the email addresses with a small Javascript code that prints the
email address adding the username, the @ char, and the domain name. The
spammers won't make their programs specially for getting the addresses from
your site, so most of them won't be able to overpass this obstacle.

Teddy