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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, a

• 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.