I’ve just spent an afternoon and evening on the local wikis I look after: CLUG, Freedom Toaster, and GeekDinner.

They’ve all been upgraded to MediaWiki 1.11.0, with reCAPTCHA on sign-ups, and OpenID support.

If you are a user of one of these wikis, you can go to Special:OpenIDConvert (CLUG, FT, GeekDinner) to add OpenID to your account.

In the past, the CLUG wiki has had minimal wikispam, because we thought up some clever regexes, that blocked spammers from editing. However spammers would still sign up, before they tried to edit. This has left the wiki with over a thousand bogous users. Not that that is a problem in itself, but it becomes a bore when you want to guess somebody’s wikiname to give them “Bureaucrat” status for example.

So jerith talked himself into coding up a quick SQL query to find all these bogus users, and a python script to remove them. Any history they’ve had has been assigned to the “Spammer” user, and they have been wiped from the wiki. If, in our zealousness, we’ve deleted any legitimate users who’ve simply never edited the wiki, we apologise. Maybe if you contribute something, it won’t happen again… :-)