Preventing Spammy User Accounts
I see the following in the recent changes and user creation log pages on on my wiki:
The person who registered on April 29 seems like a real user. However the person who registered on April 30 seems like a spammer. Could someone explain what the bracketed item means. Does it mean that he registered with that exact username [Chaosneo45; Chaosneotix] It seems to have created 2 user accounts. Is this normal? Do you think it's spammers?
If it's spam is there anything I can do to prevent it? I already use a captcha when someone registers asking them "What is the opposite of North?". I also have Bad Behaviour and Spam Blacklist installed.
It seems you have activated the enhanced recent changes where logs about operations (like creating user account) are grouped. The square bracket only contains the list of all created users for the same day. In the example you gave, Darren is separated because it's another day.
You can deactivate the enhanced recent changes in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rc by unchecking the option and saving your preferences.
Thanks I was worried there for a moment. Is there anything else I can do to prevent spammers registering as the 2 who registered with a similar name sound like they are the same person.
I don't know about MediaWiki internal configuration for such limitation.
The user probably wanted to create a new account with better name, without knowing about account renaming.
If it's a small wiki and you know the people editing you could just ask him. Or ask on his talk page, but I agree: If this is a public wiki and ithere are no anti-spam measures set up, these two users might well be spammers.
To avoid spammers registering in your wiki, you can set up the Extension:ConfirmEdit, which comes with MediaWiki 1.18 and newer. It allows you to show your users a captcha when they register.
Using CheckUser may be helpful to determine whether this was a coincidence or if this is socking.
