Autocade’s MediaWiki software gets locked down

Autocade’s third birthday is on Tuesday, though today I had to introduce something that goes against the principles of MediaWiki: the prevention of public user registrations.
   Despite adding an Akismet anti-spam extension last week, spammers, evidently using non-blacklisted IPs, continued to add false content with their links on to the site today.
   I added a line to the PHP to prevent public registrations: from today, all those who wish to contribute to Autocade must apply to me directly.
   I wouldn’t have done this if legitimate and illegitimate users were roughly the same in number. However, the illegitimate ones outnumbered the legitimate ones hugely.
   I remember when the latest wave happened: just after Waitangi Day. It was the week where I headed to Auckland and not only did my laptop contract nasty trojans the minute I hooked up to wifi there, Autocade was massively spammed. All in all, it was a pretty terrible week technologically.
   Since February 8, I have made just over 50 deletions to spam on Autocade, and only four legitimate deletions. It got a bit tiresome doing deletions so regularly. The overwhelming majority of the spam was selling insurance for American firms.
   The last wave of spam attacks was in 2008, a few months after we started.
   So for those wishing to make edits and haven’t registered (and there won’t be too many of you), I apologize—but hope the extra step will be worth it in order to keep the integrity of the site.


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