Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012

David_Gerard

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

As LW garners more traffic, it also becomes a larger target for (commercial) spam. The wiki in particular seems to lack some basic protection:

See this very recent wiki spam post.

A possible solution would be to require users who edit the wiki to have, say, 1 karma (if the user databases are synchronized).

Also, just from the "recent wiki edits" and its smörgåsbord of sketchy new user names ("IvanosbevfkwwbBohan"), it seems that the user creation process is in urgent need of a good CAPTCHA, which may also help with the first problem.

Just for reference: this has been pointed out at least once before, and I believe there was a (temporary) fix implemented (but I can't find any reference to it at the moment).

But that was almost a year ago now, so it's good to bring it up again.

7Viliam_Bur14y

I don't know if the spambots are fully automatical or human-aided. If they are fully automatical, we could just add a question "What is Eliezer's surname?" The advantage would be people learning to write it correctly. :P