This is a simple utility to keep black sheep away from a public TWiki site. The site can be protected against excessive page access (e.g. by bad robots), suspicious activities of users, such as multiple registrations or rapid topic updates indicating Wiki:WikiSpam, or saving text with wiki-spam.
The Plugin monitors activities by IP address and uses three IP address lists to protect the TWiki site:
WHITELIST: Manually maintained list of users who should never get on the BANLIST
BLACKLIST: Manually maintained list of malicious users
BANLIST: Automatically updated list of users with suspicious activities
On topic save, text is compared to a known list of spam patterns. If wiki-spam is identified, topic save is cancelled, an error message is shown, and the IP address is put on the BANLIST. Two wiki-spam lists are used:
Local SPAMLIST: Manually maintained list of spam patterns
Public wiki-spam list: Big list of wiki-spam patterns, retrieved from external web site
Users on the BLACKLIST and BANLIST will have every page access delayed by one minute and will get an error message.
The registration form can also be protected from improper use.
To fight Wiki-spam, the Plugin can also add a rel="nofollow" parameter to external URLs. Search engines will not follow links that have this parameter, taking away the incentive to add spam to TWiki.
Plugin Settings
Plugin settings are stored as preferences variables. To reference a plugin setting write %_%, i.e. %INTERWIKIPLUGIN_SHORTDESCRIPTION%
General settings
One line description, is shown in the TextFormattingRules topic:
Set SHORTDESCRIPTION = Utility to keep malicious users away from a public TWiki site
Debug plugin: (See output in data/debug.txt)
Set DEBUG = 0
Log access of blacklist and spam list activities: (0 or 1)
Set LOGACCESS = 1
Access restriction:
Set ALLOWTOPICCHANGE = TWikiAdminGroup
Set ALLOWTOPICRENAME = TWikiAdminGroup
WHITELIST, BLACKLIST and BANLIST settings
WHITELIST: Comma delimited list of IP addresses; possible to use partial addresses ending in a dot
Set WHITELIST = 127.0.0.1
BLACKLIST: Comma delimited list of IP addresses; possible to use partial addresses ending in a dot
Set BLACKLIST =
BANLIST configuration, comma delimited list of:
Points for registration
Points for each save and upload
Points for view and other actions
Points for view raw
Threshold to add to BANLIST
Measured over time (in seconds)
Set BANLISTCONFIG = 10, 5, 1, 20, 120, 300
Your current score: 3 for IP address
Message for users on BLACKLIST and BANLIST:
Set BLACKLISTMESSAGE = Your IP address is black listed at the AVR32 Linux web site due to excessive access or suspicious activities. Please contact site administrator _email1 if you got on the list by mistake.
Wiki-spam filtering settings
Filter wiki-spam on topic save and HTML file uploads based on SPAMLIST: (0 or 1)
Set FILTERWIKISPAM = 1
Comma separated list of Web.Topics to exclude from wiki-spam filtering on topic save:
Set SPAMEXCLUDETOPICS =
Public wiki-spam list: Big list of wiki-spam patterns, retrieved from external web site (thanks to MoinMoin's wiki-spam list)
Set SPAMLISTURL =
Cache refresh time (in minutes) for public wiki-merge pattern list:
Set SPAMLISTREFRESH = 60
Cache refresh time (in minutes) for internal wiki-spam regular expression cache:
Set SPAMREGEXREFRESH = 10
Message for users trying to save text with wiki-spam:
Set WIKISPAMMESSAGE = Wiki-spam detected: "%WIKISPAMWORD%" is a banned word and cannot be saved. Your IP address is black listed at the AVR32 Linux web site due to suspicious activities. Please contact site administrator _email2 if you got on the list by mistake.
Registration protection settings
Protect registration: (number of minutes to expire, 15 minutes is recommended, 0 to disable)
Set REGEXPIRE = 0
If enabled, a magic number is protecting the registration process. TWiki expects a form field with a magic number. An error message is shown if not valid or if expired. This makes it harder to register a user by a script. A hidden field needs to be added to the registration form:
Message shown when using registration form incorrectly: (this message is deliberately vague)
Set REGMESSAGE = Registration failed, please try again.
Nofollow link setting
Add a rel="nofollow" parameter to external URLs. Use this is to fight Wiki-spam. Search engines will not follow the link if a URL has a nofollow parameter, such as . Specify topic age in hours for which the nofollow parameter should appear (set it to a value that gives you enough time to remove spam); set it to -1 to add the nofollow parameter unconditionally to external URLs; or 0 to disable: (-1, 0, 1...N)
Set NOFOLLOWAGE = -1
Plugin Installation Instructions
Note: You do not need to install anything on the browser to use this plugin. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the plugin on the server where TWiki is running.
Download the ZIP file from the Plugin web (see below)
Unzip BlackListPlugin.zip in your twiki installation directory. Content:
File:
Description:
data/TWiki/BlackListPlugin.txt
Plugin topic
data/TWiki/BlackListPlugin.txt,v
Plugin topic repository
lib/TWiki/Plugins/BlackListPlugin.pm
Plugin Perl module
pub/TWiki/BlackListPlugin/.htaccess
Apache access control to protect pub dir
templates/oopsblacklist.tmpl
Generic oops message
Write protect this Plugin topic (if not already done)
Make sure pub/TWiki/BlackListPlugin/ is writable by the CGI user (typically nobody)
Add the hidden form field to the registration form as described in the "Registration protection settings" section (this is already in TWiki 4.0)
From TWiki 4.0 release on: Run the configure utility in your browser to enable the Plugin
Test if the installation was successful:
Using above form, add the IP address of one of your workstations to the BANLIST
Access TWiki from that workstation
if you look at a TWiki topic (with the view script) you should see the BLACKLISTMESSAGE (defined above) after a one minute timeout
else, you should get an 500 Internal Server Error for other scripts
On a different workstation, remove the IP address of the test workstation from the BANLIST
Known Issues and Limitations
Wiki-spam filtering for HTML attachments works in TWiki 01-Sep-2004 and later.
With TWiki 4.0.2 on some platforms, notably Solaris, attached files are uploaded with a zero file size. This is because there is a bug in how TWiki 4.0.2 handles the beforeAttachmentSaveHandler. If affected, upgrade TWiki or apply bug fix
Scan for script eval in attachments is currently hardcoded
Plugin Info
Plugin Author:
Plugin Version:
01 Jul 2006 (r10768)
Change History:
01 Jul 2006:
Added EXCLUDELIST; scan for evil script eval in attachments; scan also .js and .css attachments; fixed writeLog error on Cairo
02 Jun 2006:
Added wiki-spam filtering for HTML attachments to combat
29 Apr 2006:
Added %BLACKLISTPLUGIN{ action="spam_show_n" }% that shows the local spam list in a shareable format with newline separator
07 Feb 2006:
TWiki Release 4.0 fix to allow registration with e-mail verification, reset password and approve
03 Jan 2006:
Filter lines with space from spam list; fixed bug that inproperly filtered HTML from spam list; Dakar Release fix (end/postRenderingHandler issue)
08 Nov 2005:
Doc fixes; code warning fixes; allow empty local SPAMLIST and public spam list
04 Nov 2005:
Added registration protection with magic number
30 Oct 2005:
Dakar Release compatibility: Work around Dakar preferencs bug
29 Oct 2005:
Added wiki-spam filtering to prevent topic save with wiki-spam
27 Oct 2005:
For BANLIST, add/remove multiple IP addresses at once, contributed by
22 Jan 2005:
Added NOFOLLOWAGE handling
19 Jan 2005:
Added score for "view raw" to address e-mail harvester issue
05 Apr 2004:
Fixed bug in event log (requiring update of earlier Plugin versions); doc updates
