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Man, on the abuse front—it’s amazing the lengths that people will go through to put spam on the web. There are apparently canned solutions for pushing stuff to

by dhosek 4y ago

Man, on the abuse front—it’s amazing the lengths that people will go through to put spam on the web. There are apparently canned solutions for pushing stuff to any Mediawiki site, although I found that a really stupid captcha¹ was enough to bring that down almost to zero, but early on with rejectionwiki, I had the same sort of chronic abuser things happening that are described in the article. ⸻ 1. Basically a set of really obvious questions, like “Who wrote Hamlet?” and what’s “Shakespeare’s first name?” that any writer (for whom the site is targeted) should be able to answer.

warkdarrior 4y ago
> Basically a set of really obvious questions, like “Who wrote Hamlet?” and what’s “Shakespeare’s first name?” that any writer (for whom the site is targeted) should be able to answer. Given that ChatGPT exists now, I assume these questions will need to be replaced with something harder to automate.
- juped 4y ago
  ChatGPT would be an extremely expensive way to answer these questions.
  - addisonl 4y ago
    At MOST that is a 100 token prompt/response, so that is like $0.0002 to answer with gpt-turbo. Hardly going to break the bank...
  - corobo 4y ago
    Really? I thought these types of questions would be limited. They seem hand-crafted. If you cache the answers you're probably looking at 10 queries or so until the site admin gives up on that idea and tries something different
- dhosek 4y ago
  Given that the spammers seem to use some sort of canned software, it might have been enough to figure out how to change one or two internal URLs in MediaWiki, actually.
  - josephg 4y ago
    Yep. I think writing code is quite difficult for most spammers. They often depend on hacked together scripts and things other people have written. Making those obvious scripts fail can make a massive difference. I suppose people who can write good code can usually make a lot more money by getting a real programming job. Years ago I heard of a simple anti-spam technique where you add extra form fields to a web form. Then use CSS to make those fields invisible. Put a check in your backend where if you see any content in those form fields, you respond with 200 OK but ignore the request. The programmer in me can immediately think of 10 ways to get around that - the most obvious being to fill in spam using a real web browser, automated via webdriver or something. But apparently that one trick removed ~95% of spam on their site.
codetrotter 4y ago
> Who wrote Hamlet? Sir Francis Bacon :smirk:
naniwaduni 4y ago
> that any writer (for whom the site is targeted) should be able to answer hey now, not all writers who discuss things in English are necessarily familiar with the anglo literary tradition (it's probably a higher overlap than average, and shouldn't be too hard for them to search, but be careful throwing the assumption around)
chrismorgan 4y ago
(Ooh, three-em dash. Fancy! I use two-em dash very occasionally in prose, and —⁂— as a section and footnote divider, but haven’t found anywhere I really wanted to use three-em dash, though I did still add a Compose key binding for it.)

by dhosek 4y ago

warkdarrior 4y ago

> Basically a set of really obvious questions, like “Who wrote Hamlet?” and what’s “Shakespeare’s first name?” that any writer (for whom the site is targeted) should be able to answer. Given that ChatGPT exists now, I assume these questions will need to be replaced with something harder to automate.

juped 4y ago
ChatGPT would be an extremely expensive way to answer these questions.
- addisonl 4y ago
  At MOST that is a 100 token prompt/response, so that is like $0.0002 to answer with gpt-turbo. Hardly going to break the bank...
- corobo 4y ago
  Really? I thought these types of questions would be limited. They seem hand-crafted. If you cache the answers you're probably looking at 10 queries or so until the site admin gives up on that idea and tries something different
dhosek 4y ago
Given that the spammers seem to use some sort of canned software, it might have been enough to figure out how to change one or two internal URLs in MediaWiki, actually.
- josephg 4y ago
  Yep. I think writing code is quite difficult for most spammers. They often depend on hacked together scripts and things other people have written. Making those obvious scripts fail can make a massive difference. I suppose people who can write good code can usually make a lot more money by getting a real programming job. Years ago I heard of a simple anti-spam technique where you add extra form fields to a web form. Then use CSS to make those fields invisible. Put a check in your backend where if you see any content in those form fields, you respond with 200 OK but ignore the request. The programmer in me can immediately think of 10 ways to get around that - the most obvious being to fill in spam using a real web browser, automated via webdriver or something. But apparently that one trick removed ~95% of spam on their site.

codetrotter 4y ago

> Who wrote Hamlet? Sir Francis Bacon :smirk:

naniwaduni 4y ago

> that any writer (for whom the site is targeted) should be able to answer hey now, not all writers who discuss things in English are necessarily familiar with the anglo literary tradition (it's probably a higher overlap than average, and shouldn't be too hard for them to search, but be careful throwing the assumption around)

chrismorgan 4y ago

(Ooh, three-em dash. Fancy! I use two-em dash very occasionally in prose, and —⁂— as a section and footnote divider, but haven’t found anywhere I really wanted to use three-em dash, though I did still add a Compose key binding for it.)