Dwarf Fortress Wiki talk:Spambot attacks

One Possible Solution

The spambots are really getting out of hand. Do we know if they're targeting us specifically? If not, it might help to put something like a nonce on the signup page: just a text box where it forces you to type "magma" to sign up or something else unique to this site to thwart bots. The spammers won't adapt their software to spam us unless it's worth the effort, and if they're just hunting down random wikis to spam, it's probably not worth their effort and they'll go away. Uristocrat 04:09, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

I've already added several things to help deter spambots, which has stemmed a large percentage (we're actually only seeing about .5% of the attacks make it to an actual account registration and post). I'll see about incorporating that as well here in the near future. --Briess 05:02, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Good to know. I saw another thread about a different spam attack on this wiki when I was looking around and I sent a contact at Google's anti-spam division some ideas about how to combat wiki-spam like what happened here, given that it apparently made it into Google's index at one point. No clue if they'll do anything, but they did make an algorithm change recently, so you never know. And anything that kills their incentive for spamming us is good. I've heard good things about making your site unique (even via dead-simple tests, so long as too many people aren't using the exact same thing), so hopefully that helps get rid of that last 0.5%. I see that we're already using rel=nofollow and such, so best of luck combating the spambot menace. Uristocrat 05:26, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Anything we can do?

I'm watching some spambots attack right now and you guys don't appear to be online to banish them at the moment. I've blanked out the spam I could find and replaced it with the deletion template. I also marked the two user pages for the confirmed spammers with the same template. I don't really know if that helps or not, but is there anything we normal users can do to help kick these spammers out? Uristocrat 07:12, 7 February 2011 (UTC)