Forum:New User names

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What's up with all the new users with similar looking names along the lines of FirstnameSecondname?

Leverage (talk) 11:24, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Whoa true! Someone check their IP's please? Cat the Colourful (Feed me!) Zzz 11:24, 23 March, 2013 (UTC)

Ah, tits. I've seen that at Illogicopedia too. Can't remember whether it's a bug or some mass spam thing. Best to tell Legoktm if he's not on it already. -RAHB 12:07, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

It's spam; Oncyclopedia got rid of most of these with mw:extension:KeyCAPTCHA but at the expense of breaking new user registration for users without Java and Flash. Existing spam registrations with no edits can be removed with mw:manual:removeUnusedAccounts. CAPTCHA is giving variable results; some versions are useless (giving simple math problems to bots? why?) while others do reduce spam at the expense of annoying legitimate new users. Wikipedia uses mw:extension:GlobalBlocking with a long list of problem IP addresses which might be worth importing and blocking. Unfortunately there isn't a script yet to import the lot of them from WP's global blocks (where the list is available from api.php) and block them en masse. Checkuser and ban one at a time seems too slow to be useful. There are pages on controlling spam and controlling vandalism on mediawiki.org which may be of use. WP itself seems to be mw:extension:AbuseFilter, mw:extension:GlobalBlocking mw:extension:ConfirmEdit as the main blocks against spam registrations. Carlb (talk) 15:48, 23 March 2013 (UTC)