On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 06:55:32PM +0100, Tom Heath wrote:
Is one solution to this to strip inline styles from
user input?
I think a more general solution would be to implement a banned content list,
which would be checked after an edit is submitted and before it is written.
If a match is found, a message is displayed saying the edit was rejected,
and optionally that the IP address has been banned, for those people who
thrash our servers - although these days spam attacks come from large
numbers of IPs (probably compromised machines) rather than just one.
The banned content list should probably be kept in a local file and be read
in by Wiki::Toolkit. The advantage of keeping it in a file is being able to
update it with a cron job that retrieves it from some central location.
Blacklists of spam URLs already exist, e.g.
http://blacklist.chongqed.org/ ,
but are gigantic as you can see. Rather than comparing against these every
time an edit is made and using scads of memory, I can see two options:
1) Maintain our own list of known OG-targeting spammers somewhere on
openguides.org. The disadvantage of this is that it goes out of date every
time a new spammer turns up and has to be added to manually, and then the
spam in question has to be removed. The advantage is that the list will stay
quite small.
2) Use a blacklist such as the Chongqed one, but only check against it if
the body text or metadata contains a URL. This approach will mean it happens
fairly rarely.
There's also Ivor's Wiki::Toolkit plugin for Simon Cozens' SpamMonkey, which
I haven't meant to ignore in this post, I just don't know anything about how
it works under the hood.
--
Earle Martin
http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/