These bots or paid spammers have been promoting a Vietnamese holiday website and a bunch of copy-paste news articles
All have been blocked and their articles deleted.
These bots or paid spammers have been promoting a Vietnamese holiday website and a bunch of copy-paste news articles
All have been blocked and their articles deleted.
You might need to temporarily disable new members until you can figure out a way of confirming them that the bots can’t get around. It could be as simple as adding some small change, depending on who’s doing this, whether they have access to the bots’ code, and whether or not they’re targeting enough other wikis that they won’t notice if their bots start failing on this one.
There’s an option to block IP’s created by the username, however, it lasts for a day only. I might have to look further into this.
If the bots are using a VPN, it might be possible to block certain ranges of IP addresses based on that, as I’ve seen some websites do, but that would prevent any legitimate users who are using that VPN from making accounts. It also wouldn’t necessarily be a permanent solution if more bots arrived using a different VPN, or if the current bots switched to another VPN. You could block VPNs altogether, but that’s probably not ideal.
How much control do you have over the wiki and its software? Are you hosting it yourself?
I have full control of the wiki and its software. I don’t have control over the machine hosting it, as I could only afford a shared plan (for now).
The solution I’ve found for now was to restrict all editing from anonymous and new users. And to allow comrades to edit and create articles, I created a new user group allowing users to do exactly that.
The only downside is that it’s done manually, and restricting editing will probably affect the editing frequency of ProleWiki for a while. Oh, well.
EDIT: It’s done. A bunch of spammer accounts created, none was able to create a single article. A battle won.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Antispam
Thought this might be of use
Bot farms commonly use rented private IP addresses. The good ones anyways avoid obvious tells like using a VPN. Basically they use methods to acquire access to IP addresses assigned to consumer facing ISPs to appear as if they’re a normal person living in some city somewhere. IP blocks are not typically the way to go to prevent spam unless you have only a few IP’s being consistently used.