What a beautiful sight to behold
I wish that Leftypedia looked as clean as that. It’s been under assault by so many spambots for so long that I keep wondering if they’re slowing the website down.
We had to turn on forced registrations with manual approval as we also had a ton of spam very quickly in the beginning… mediawiki lol
And the MediaWiki wizards aren’t doing a damned thing about it. Scumbags.
Yes. I found out a standard MediaWiki installation connects to Wikimedia and pings MediaWiki. This could be stored somewhere and bots could have access to it. That’s my hypothesis. You have to explicitly disable it.
Besides that, we had to install an extension which only creates accounts upon approval. I have documented our quest fighting spam here, for historical purposes. Should also be useful for Leftypedia if they wish to fight their own malignant cancer.
What do spam accounts even do on a wiki?
Make advertisment accounts (advertise on their user page) and possible create spam pages, but probably not because they try to fly under the radar.
wiki sites are very optimised for SEO because they have so much content and so many outside links. They also have a ton of pages about different topics, and they have a higher propensity to be linked to.
Their idea is probably not to advertise on the wiki itself but to build SEO for their own shady product.
I was thinking about making a contribution to it recently, but eh, I’ve said that before.
Still, this is good.
