User talk:OlvAow

Are you guys noticing a pattern here? There are suddenly a lot of users who are suddenly registering and arbitrarily truncating large articles. Wtf? --Nonsensical 15:33, 6 July 2007 (EDT)

Yes. It sucks. Can someone tell is the IPs used and see if there's a pattern? Foobar 16:12, 6 July 2007 (EDT)

I'm not aware of any way to look up user IPs. Which is unfortunate because I too am completely puzzled by these users.  − Reaganaut  20:08, 6 July 2007 (EDT)

hmm. well, at the minumum, i strongly suggest that these accounts get blocked with "block new account creation" as well. i just noticed one which, upon blocking, prevented creation of a new account from the same IP, according to the block log. Foobar 20:25, 7 July 2007 (EDT)

I tried to look for other reports of this and possible solutions, but this is all I came up with [1]. Does wikicu validate e-mail addresses? It seems like a captcha would be a good solution, as was proposed earlier. There seems to be an available extension that seems easy to add on, provided we're using a recent version of MediaWiki: [2]

I think it'd be great if we went back to allowing unregistered edits with:

Unregistered - must pass a captcha for all edits

Registered - No captcha to edit, but must pass a captcha to register

--Nonsensical 01:12, 8 July 2007 (EDT)

Great idea! I've installed the ConfirmEdit extension. I've set it to perform a captcha test on all new accounts, and any edits by regular users that include an external link. Sysops and users who confirm their email are exempt. We'll soon find out if it works. If not, I'll install the image-based captcha. (At the moment, it's a simple 'add up 2 numbers' captcha.)  − Reaganaut  03:39, 8 July 2007 (EDT)

Wow -- that does sound exactly like our problem: "user names were all composed of six random letters and numbers". Any guesses as to the business model here?

1. delete text
3. profit

Foobar 10:16, 8 July 2007 (EDT)