Good spam account prevention methods for MediaWiki

Look on MediaWiki's Extensions Matrix. There are a few anti-spam extensions listed there.

I can say from experience that it's best to test extensions on a test site first, to make sure they'll work in a live installation.

ConfirmEdit is working for me on MediaWiki 1.19. We're using QuestyCaptcha (some discussion here about this vs. reCAPTCHA).

The only thing I would add is that eventually (after 6-12 months) someone will teach the robots the correct answers and you'll need to change your questions/answers to something new. Once we did that, the bogus account creation stopped completely. Other than that, it's been really effective for us.

@Vance:

ConfirmEdit is working for me on MediaWiki 1.19. We're using QuestyCaptcha (some discussion here about this vs. reCAPTCHA).

The only thing I would add is that eventually (after 6-12 months) someone will teach the robots the correct answers and you'll need to change your questions/answers to something new. Once we did that, the bogus account creation stopped completely. Other than that, it's been really effective for us.

Thanks. I tried to do that, but ConfirmEdit creates a 500 error on the account creation page.

What do your logs say? If they don't contain anything about the error, you may need to alter the error reporting level.

[Sat Jul 20 13:09:56 2013] [error] [client 173.66.232.101] PHP Fatal error: Class 'QuestyCaptcha' not found in /home/sasha/web_servers/wikihub.ssu.lt/shared_files/ConfirmEdit/ConfirmEditHooks.php on line 16, referer: http://community.wikihub.ssu.lt/Special:RecentChanges

The extension is kept in a shared files directory used by the wiki farm, though there's only one wiki ATM.

EDIT

I was going from Special:RecentChanges to Special:CreateAccount.

A couple things to look into:

On our wiki, the account creation page is not accessed as Special:CreateAccount, it is accessed as Special:UserLogin&type=signup. This may be a difference between versions of MediaWiki, I don't know. (I'll note that trying to access Special:CreateAccount on our wiki redirects to Special:UserLogin/signup, so this may not actually be a problem.)

Do you have a line like the following in your LocalSettings.php?

require_once( "$IP/extensions/ConfirmEdit/QuestyCaptcha.php" );

I think you'll need to load that before you can access the QuestyCaptcha class. Since your directory structure seems to be special, you'll have to modify the above line so it points to the proper location.

@Vance:

A couple things to look into:

On our wiki, the account creation page is not accessed as Special:CreateAccount, it is accessed as Special:UserLogin&type=signup. This may be a difference between versions of MediaWiki, I don't know. (I'll note that trying to access Special:CreateAccount on our wiki redirects to Special:UserLogin/signup, so this may not actually be a problem.)

Do you have a line like the following in your LocalSettings.php?

require_once( "$IP/extensions/ConfirmEdit/QuestyCaptcha.php" );

I think you'll need to load that before you can access the QuestyCaptcha class. Since your directory structure seems to be special, you'll have to modify the above line so it points to the proper location.

I have a GlobalSettings.php file in another directory that's included, but I don't have that line in it. I'll add it. Thanks.

EDIT

It seems to work. Thanks.