Extension:ConfirmEdit/FancyCaptcha experiments

December 2014

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

• 00:17 disabled by gerrit:177494
• 00:35 re-enabled by gerrit:177708

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]
  • Special:AbuseFilter/24 tweaked, to disallow and block
• 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.