[Opensim-dev] Wiki: Captcha, anyone?

[Fritigern Gothly]

Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version , i see that
in addition to ConfirmEdit, they have a number of anti-spam measures
installed. One that caught my eye specifically, is TorBlock, which
makes that no users of anonymous proxies can edit the wiki.
Spammers often use these anonymizers to hide their identity, and
although this will unfortunately also block a small percentage of
bonafide users who use Tor (or another anonymizer) from editing the
wiki, this, in combination with a captcha, may also prove to be an
effective tool to combat spam.

@M.E. Verhagen: I am with Justin on this, we want to put up as few
barriers as possible for people to register and edit the wiki. We want
as many people as possible to add what they know, to correct errors
and omissions, making new members wait until one of the sysops finds
the time to enable their account, will make these people lose interest
very fast.
What we do want is to thwart automated processes from signing up, and
circumvent our measures to prevent this. For that reason, i really do
like Michelle Argus' suggestion to make a minor change that will throw
a bot off, but which will not hinder real persons from signing up
and/or posting.

@Bo, i kind of like the idea, and i definitely think that it would
work for a grid-specific wiki, like the OSGrid wiki, or the Inworldz
wiki. However, the OpenSim wiki would have to be able to send a
message to every grid, including those that are not listed anywhere.
You could make a custom signup form, asking for avatar name, grid (in
a freeform textbox), etc. But that may in turn lead to an even worse
vulnerability.
Imagine the following scenario: This guy called Bo bumped into my
avatar and did not apologize, and i want to take revenge. So i write
some script that will fill out his avatar name and grid into our shiny
new form. You would then get bombarded by a massive number of requests
to confirm your identity, ruining your fun of being in-world. And we
don't want to be responsible for that either. It would turn us from
target for spam, into a griefing tool. And i would much rather be a
target than a tool :-)