[Qemu-devel] cry for help: wiki.qemu.org spam

[Michael Tokarev <mjt@tls.msk.ru>]

The amount of spam our wiki.qemu.org collects, is
increasing every day.  It was easy several months
ago to manually delete these pages once a week to
keep wiki spam-free, now they sometimes manage to
re-create a page while I delete it!

No, it is not counted in 1000s per day - not yet
anyway.  But 10..20 new users with the same amount
of new spam pages per day become a norm.

To see how it looks like, see the RecentChanges:

 http://wiki.qemu.org/Special:RecentChanges

There, each new user adds one spam page.  And see
this link

 http://wiki.qemu.org/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&hidebots=0

to see my actions too.

What complicates things alot for me is the fact
that now, after wiki changes, *every* "Delete page"
operation takes 30..60 seconds to complete, and
during all this time the wiki is not doing anything.
This should be fixed too, I think.

Now, I think the best course is to restrict new
user creation, require moderation for new users.
The best will be to ask them to write some words
in the confirmation email as of why they want the
account, -- so that the moderator will be able to
tell somewhat if this is for real or not; but I've
no idea if such a feature exists in mediawiki.

I can play moderational role, -- this at least should
be significantly easier than my current delete page
approach.

And if not, I'd love to see Nuke extension enabled --
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Nuke -- which
should help with page deletion.

Any other suggestions are ofcourse welcome.

Thanks,

/mjt