Extension:ConfirmEdit/FancyCaptcha experiments

From mediawiki.org

December 2014[edit]

On 2014-12-05, we tried disabling ConfirmEdit altogether on MediaWiki.org: no captcha at all for account registration, edits adding URLs etc.

Results:

  • Some users more were registered.[1]
  • There might have been some more userpage spam than usual [2], sometimes by unregistered accounts.
    • Some were blocked by existing filters,[3] which were generally busier.[4] There was no time to test whether AbuseFilter rules would have been enough to stop it.

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]
  • 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.