Bitcoin captcha

This post was syndicated from: Grigor Gatchev - A Weblog and was written by: Григор. Original post: at Grigor Gatchev - A Weblog

There is a lot of wiki spam novadays. The wikis I host were close to being rendered useless by the amount of e-trash pumped in by spambots. Naturally, I had to do something.

The first idea was to install a captcha extension. There are plenty for MediaWiki (all my wikis are powered by it). However, some wikis sport too old versions of MW to have a decent captcha, and one or two cannot or should not be upgraded. On some others, captchas are undesirable for various reasons. Also, a captcha will not clean the already present spam. So I needed a different solution.

Happily, one of my hobbies is a MediaWiki bot software. I threw up a spam-cleaning script for it and set it over the wikis. The first attempts missed a lot of spam and had some false positives, but this was quickly fixed. It took me some more time to start reliably catching the spambot “valdalisms” (edits with no spam links, made to make the spambot blacklisting harder). Currently the script makes approximately one mistake per 1000 edits, or even less – that is, almost no cleaning handwork is left after it. I believe this is a good result.

And since good things should not stay idle, I decided to offer its abilities as a service. In short, I am offering cleaning from the spam MediaWiki-based wikis. If you need cleaning this e-muck, just email me (“grigor” at this site, that is, “gatchev.info”). I’d be glad to help.

In case you insist on paying for the service, I accept Bitcoins on address “1FvF2Y39HGjXxvhsmtLmt8oRMmicLqR561″ (minus the quotes). An example fee could be 0.01 Bitcoin per 10 000 spams cleaned, but feel free to suggest a different one, if you like.