ばか！バカ！　馬鹿ー月！

In light of the recent spam account creation problem:

I suggest that until a solution (ie: captcha, question, whatever) is implemented, we disable account creation temporarily.

A message of apology, explaining the situation as well, on the account registration page would be a good move along with this.

Zero2001 wrote:we disable account creation temporarily.

I don't think it's that bad that we have to be that extreme, is it?

Actually it is.

I've been noticing that the majority of those who are capable, are busy blocking when they could be translating or editing. Temporarily disabling registration would be the optimal solution. Plus it'll create an awareness and dislike of spammers thus stopping many potential spammers before they reach this point.

Well the problem here is that no one currently present is capable of disabling new user registration. Sigh...

Well, deletion can be done for 20 accounts in less than 1 minute for me. As much as the bots are annoying, I still want the occasional useful helper to have an account.

As for Big Boss, he hasn't logged in since Labor Day. Just got to be patient.

No, account creation really shouldn't be deactivated... But a Captcha would be a really good thing, though.

Well... if it's no trouble for the patrollers and doesn't interfere with their other duties. Besides I was only suggesting it as a temporary measure until captcha/question was implemented. After that it could be brought back.

Yeah, but either way would involve TLG, so we can't do anything about it...

True

When I looked at the recent changes just now, it was obvious that the problem has become serious. This way the database will be flooded with myriad of spam bot accounts within weeks.

This surely has happened on other Wikimedia pages as well, as i have seen such bots on Wikipedia a lot. A wiki I know of solved the problem with specific questions on account registration that stopped the flooding completely. That may also be because the questions aren't written in English language, and the majority of spam bots surely is made by people with English as their mother tongue.

How about puzzle captchas? For example: http://www.digital-spin.com/demo.php

stellarroze wrote:How about puzzle captchas? For example: http://www.digital-spin.com/demo.php

Why not, that's always better than what we currently have.

However, as they can contain ads, I don't think it would be a great idea to put them.

A phrase that fits this circumstance: Less talk more action

We need to stop discussing which captcha to implement and actually implement one... The longer we take the more damage we accumulate.

Therefore... Oniiiiiiiiii.

As I already said, I don't think Oni has the power to add extension to our Wiki, I think I read somewhere that only TLG is able to do so.

Well, let's give more power to ONI then! We're already no longer a communist site, y why not turn it iNto a dictatorship?

That's alright now.

TLG did a great job improving the current system. ^^

Now there is a Captcha, plus a lot of other cool and usefull/less features.