I just noticed that I was unable to make any edits because my IP address has been blocked. The IP it has me registered under is 10.230.23.35, however this is not what I get when I enter the IRC (That begins with 71.) Apparently almost everyone else is using this IP too, as others have made edits to agent pages while under it. I believe the IP was banned because the spam bots were also using it, but right now I'm locked out too.
10.230.23.25 is within the 10.0.0.0/8 reserved block of IP addresses - no one on the internet actually comes from those (because [technical stuff])... So if I had to guess, I'd say the wiki (or the hosting system) is seeing/interpreting everybody as coming from a machine / gateway / router / TCP-over-quantum-entanglement transceiver on its local network... So banning that address due to a spammer would effectively ban everyone. -Bats (or it could be nothing like that at all. it's been a very, very long day)
Creating an account now works but the confirmation option for emails will immediately tell you that the code is invalid and has possibly expired.
Thank you for alerting us to that. We are having problems with Bots, and we are trying to find the right solution for new accounts.
The same thing happened to me, but after I authenticated to the wiki and went to my profile page I saw a message giving me an option to resend a verification email. I'm sorry I can't remember the exact text of the message. After generating a new email and also ensuring I was still logged into the wiki (so I would not be prompted to login during the verification process) I was successfully able able to click the link in my verification email and complete the process. That was a couple of days ago, so I don't know if this still works.
Would it be possible to tie the accounts to the forum account in some way? So, for example, having a user on the wiki would require creating a user on the forums, thus using the forums security measures to avoid the majority of bots (as we haven't had one on the forums in a while, nor a large influx in even longer). On an aside, the bots are coming in faster, it seems, with 20+ new suspicious accounts today alone. :S
We're currently trying to prevent them from killing John Connor, so it may take a few decades before we finally beat them.
What i suggest is to add some extra layer of verification. Like when you register, you will have to be approved by Wiki admin. + editinng adding wiki articels should be also behind registration. I think MediaWiki can bend to that will but i need to check it out on my beta server
That can be done on MediaWiki. We had to do that on the The Secret World wiki. You had to prove you were human in order to create an account, and then editing privileges were added with a ramp from personal page to all access.