How Should We Deal With Spam

In 2007, automated spam-bots spewed stuff all over Open Circuits. Reverting any one instance only took a minute (see How to delete spam). But there were so many that the nice people of Open Circuits were annoyed that they were spending all their wiki-time dealing with spammers, rather than doing something productive.

What should we do about it?

Lets put our discussion here.

Current Spam Prevention
Secret we cannot let the terrorists know

How Bad is it Now
A real problem, reverting takes a lot of time and seems to last about a day.
 * Dec 2007

Seems much better, perhaps acceptable. DavidCary ? must have changed something.
 * Mar 10 2008

Methods We Might Use
One goal of Open Circuits is to help people build amazing and wonderful things by giving them plans they can use and improve. Spam is a problem when it distracts us from that goal. Alas, the "easy" solutions to spam also prevent us from achieving that goal -- they make it so difficult to help us improve these plans that most people aren't going to bother. Fortunately, people are working on better solutions.

If you have something new add it

Three cents
Get rid of captcha it puts people off contributing. Read Mediawiki on Anti-spam features and Combating spam. Install extensions at least: AbuseFilter and DeleteBatch -- Robkam 12:28, 9 November 2012 (UTC)