Protect your content and data from spam and vandalism with extensions designed to help better secure your wiki.
In the EditOwn extension, the sysop made the decision that only authors could edit their own work. AuthorProtect leaves this decision in the hands of the individual authors. They can choose to protect a page that they create by blocking everyone but themselves and the sysop from editing the page, or they can leave the page alone and let any user make edits.
The option to protect a page is done on a page-by-page basis. Installing this extension does not protect every page on the wiki by default.
When it comes to bots spamming your wiki, you can never be too safe. CheckSpambots is an extension that checks the IP address of an editor, their e-mail address, and name against databases that list known spammers. The blacklists are all hosted on external servers and include:
FSpamlist - fspamlist.com
Stop Forum Spam - stopforumspam.com
SORBS - sorbs.net
Spamhaus - spamhaus.org
SpamCop - spamcop.net
Project Honey Pot - projecthoneypot.org
BotScout - botscout.com
DroneBL - dronebl.org
AHBL - ahbl.org
Undisposable - undisposable.net
Tor Project - torproject.org
This extension does not check the body of the edit and does not check external links to see if they are spam. Other considerations include the fact that there is no whitelist so every edit is checked against these external servers. Because these servers are hosted elsewhere, the edit process will be noticeably slower.
More and more IT departments are requiring users to have strong passwords for their accounts as a way to protect against brute force attacks. This extension, EnforceStrongPassword, allows the sysop to define minimum password requirements for all users.
If you have users already registered for your wiki, notify them of the requirements. Once the extension is installed, they will not be able to log in if their password does not meet the minimum requirements.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EnforceStrongPassword
If the author wishes to protect specific pages using a password, for both viewing and editing, then this extension should be installed. PasswordProtectPages creates a protect link on the page that redirects the author to a page to set up the page password. After doing this, anyone wanting to read or edit this page has to unlock it using the predetermined password.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PasswordProtectPages
We saw Bad Behavior in Chapter 8 when we learned how to keep spam comments. This extension not only helps prevent spam, but it will help keep e-mail harvesters from stealing e-mail addresses from your wiki.