Dwarf Fortress Wiki talk:Administrative intervention against vandalism

Time for More Drastic Measures?

As you say, it seems like they're getting more clever. Again, this suggests to me that some degree of human interaction is involved with the SPAM, not just spambots. (Like I observed here: Dwarf_Fortress_Wiki_talk:Spamreport) Now that they're really fighting dirty, perhaps it's time to consider more drastic measures? Perhaps applicants should be required to briefly state their reason for wanting to become a member? Then new members could be manually screened based on this. Or, perhaps there is some way to check the usernames on bay12forums and only allow new members here with the same (or very similar) usernames? But I'm really liking Uristocrat's suggestion (see Dwarf_Fortress_Wiki_talk:Spambot_attacks) of having a text box where it forces you to answer Dwarf Fortress trivia questions (such as some fact about "magma") to sign up. As I see it, those who desire to be a member here and have the knowledge to contribute something should be able to answer some simple questions about the game. A spambot or SPAM vandal, on the other hand, would not. Anyway, isn't there some method to trace these attacks all the way back to the origin? Even if these attacks all originate from previously compromised wikis and can't be traced any further, in many cases it should be possible to report these vandalism and SPAM attacks to the ISP which hosts such sites. If the ISP has any integrity, they would either investigate or shut the site down. (Which, IMO, is a much better solution than just blocking account creation from that IP.) If nothing else, you could put a hold/block on new membership for a period of 2 weeks or longer and see if that works. --Thundercraft 23:39, 11 February 2011 (UTC)