[uf-discuss] MediaWiki plugin

[Ryan King]

On Jan 7, 2009, at 7:09 PM, Bob Jonkman wrote:
> 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.

I think we'd all be more than willing to hear suggestions for spam  
fighting methods that are equally effective. Or, at least, an offer to  
police the recent updates page. :)

-ryan