Since I moved my LDAP wiki over from DokuWiki to MediaWiki, I’ve been burried by a daily torrent of spam. Just like with my tropical timber investments wiki, the ReCaptcha extension (with pretty intrusive settings) doesn’t seem to do much to stop this shitstream.

How do the spammers do this? Do they primarily trick visitors of other websites into solving this captchas for them or do they employ spam-sweatshops in third-world countries? Fuck them! I’m trying something new.

I’ve upgraded to the ConfirmEdit extension. (ReCaptcha has also moved into this extension.) This allows me to try different Captcha types. The one I was most interested in is QuestyChaptcha, which allows me to define a set of questions which the user needs to answer. I’m now trying it out with the following question:

$wgCaptchaQuestions[] = array( 'question' => "LDAP stands for ...", 'answer' => "Lightweight Directory Access Protocol" );

I don’t think it’s a particularly good question, since it’s incredibly easy to Google. But, we’ll see, and in the mean time I’ll try to come up with one or two questions that are context-sensitive, yet easy enough to answer for anyone with some knowledge of LDAP. If you have an idea, please leave a comment.