Extension:ConfirmEdit/FancyCaptcha experiments
December 2014
editOn 2014-12-05, we tried disabling ConfirmEdit altogether on MediaWiki.org: no captcha at all for account registration, edits adding URLs etc.
- 00:17 disabled by gerrit:177494
- 00:35 re-enabled by gerrit:177708
Results:
- Some users more were registered.[1]
- There might have been some more userpage spam than usual [2], sometimes by unregistered accounts.
Conclusions:
- We're mostly slowing down generic spambots which don't target MediaWiki (they don't even try to login or use valid wikitext) [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
- Special:AbuseFilter/24 tweaked, to disallow and block
- Some simple linkspam, of a kind which regularly gets through, might have become faster [10]
- Unclear yet about user registration
- Effects may be worse on wikis with less sophisticated abuse filters. Disabling captchas on MediaWiki.org can be useful to determine what rules should be moved to global abuse filters.