[uf-discuss] MediaWiki plugin

[Bob Jonkman]

On 5 Jan 2009, at 12:05, Martin McEvoy wrote:

>> It looks to me like the wiki is being spammed  by a bot or bots [...]
>
>> I stopped it by changing the form names to to something gibberish, 
>> nothing standard  "wpTextbox1" would be come "ZifG5ut"  nonsense 
>> basically, a good Idea is to change the form names regularly,  then 
>> you can encode the submit, preview and show pages buttons in Java 
>> script and insert them using a function

This seems like a contrary thing to do for an organization that advocates POSHness.  
Shouldn't form names be semantically meaningful, like any other markup?  And 
Javascrippling a form excludes anyone who intentionally disables scripting for security, 
never mind those folks who need to browse with a text-based browser for accessibility 
issues (I know of no text-based Javascript browsers).

I'm not saying that form obfuscation isn't effective to combat spam, but that's not our 
dogfood.

--Bob.