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[RESOLVED] How do I enable the edit throttle

4
DavidCary (talkcontribs)

The page http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Autoconfirmed implies that mediawiki can throttle edits. Currently my LocalSettings.php file includes the lines:

$wgAutoConfirmAge = 60*60*24*30; # about 1 month, in seconds.
$wgAutoConfirmCount = 3; # edits.
$wgRateLimits['edit']['newbie'] = array( 1, 60*60*24 ); # one edit per day.
$wgRateLimits['edit']['ip'] = array( 1, 60*60*24 ); # one edit per day

What I expected to happen with the above settings is that a new spam account might be able to slip in one spam per day, but the mediawiki software would block any other attempt to create a new page or edit a pre-existing page until tomorrow.

What I see actually happening is that one spammer can register a new account, and then through that one account create several pages full of spam within the hour.

How do I enable the edit throttle at http://opencircuits.com/ ? MediaWiki 1.19.2; PHP 5.3.27 (cgi-fcgi); MySQL 5.1.56-log.

Ciencia Al Poder (talkcontribs)
DavidCary (talkcontribs)

Dear Ciencia Al Poder,

Thank you for the recommendation to try QuestyCaptcha. After I switched from ReCaptcha to QuestyCaptcha with a long list of home-grown questions, I got *much* less spam.

As you guessed, I -- as recommended at at memcached -- don't have memcached installed.

I am curious: Why do these rate limiter / edit throttle extensions require memcached? Would it make make any sense to write a new rate limiter / edit throttle extension that did not depend on memcached?

Ciencia Al Poder (talkcontribs)

It requires memcached because it stores in memory the amount of edits, moves, etc per user and period. It could be stored in database instead, but it may be a noticeable performance penalty compared to store that small amount of data in memory.

Storing things in memory is done with memcached, because in PHP, when the page request ends, all variables in memory are freed.

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