Topic on Project:Village Pump

Experimental disabling of the captcha

3
Tgr (talkcontribs)

Hi all,

there is a discussion in T6845 about experimentally disabling the captcha for a short period of time and seeing what effect that has. We have long known that our captcha can be trivially broken by off-the-shelf tools and such does not provide any barrier to a minimally dedicated spammer (while it does provide a significant barrier to users with disabilities and non-English speakers). That's the theory, any way; it would be nice to get some empirical evidence.

Your feedback on this plan would be appreciated.

Ciencia Al Poder (talkcontribs)

mediawiki.org has not a lot of traffic compared to Wikipedias. If we have more vandalism visible for a short amount of time, that's not something a lot of people would notice.

It would be good to keep an eye on recent changes when captchas are disabled, just to see if the amount of spam and vandalism gets unmanageable.

Something to get statistics from when the captcha is disabled, is the number of edits trapped by the AbuseFilter, because it currently catches quite a lot of abuse.

Legoktm (talkcontribs)

I am strongly in favor of this. Last time it was re-enabled pretty quickly, which didn't give us much time to actually examine the new spam and write/tune AbuseFilter rules to counter it to see if that was a feasible alternative. So we should commit to leaving it off for at least a few days, just to see how bad it would actually be.

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