*Unlurks*

Greetings.

Earle Martin wrote:

What would you nominate?

I'll start the ball rolling: I think we need a banned-content plugin. Regular expressions (e.g. "cheap-viagra-levitra.com") could be added to a list.

This list would be checked against edit text before the node is written. If a match is found, an "Edit Denied" error is shown. Optionally: the IP address is also added to a banned IPs list that are not permitted to edit. It would be fairly trivial to set up something that gets the big list of http://www.communitywiki.org/cw/BannedContent on a nightly basis.

The need for this is clear, IMHO, given that OpenGuides sites are being subjected to a barrage of spam at the moment which comes from a range of different IPs every time - simple IP blocking will not defend us against this.

Thoughts?

Banning IP addresses may constitute a wild goose chase, since blocking/monitoring them is the obvious approach, and spammers will probably get around it by all the obvious means (botnets, open proxies, etc)

Other suggestions?

Use wiki as "ham" corpus, maintain "spam" corpus, use Bayesian analysis on keyword and other metrics to discriminate between spam & nonspam. (It's the only way to be sure).

</$.02>

Tim