Usemod is one of the older wiki engines and is in wide use. It is written in Perl and has one really nice feature that Manni and I miss with OddMuse, subpages. It has been a long while since the last release which means it is lacking in modern features such as spam protection. Luckily the community is large and many patches are available to add important features.
homepage: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
There are no anti-spam features built into usemod.
The latest 1.0 version does not include 'nofollow noindex' meta tags on old revision pages. This can be remedied with this patch: WikiPatches/RobotsNoFollow, which usemod administrators should install immediately. We would very much like to see this included in the next usemod release. Without this, AntiSpamUserSolutions are pretty ineffective.
It took a while but finally somebody published the code (or coding steps) for a content banning patch WikiPatches/BannedContent. Currently this hasn't been tested by anyone on an up-to-date unmodified usemod installation, but ContentBanning is a good simple approach to spam protection, so try this out and let us know how it goes!
There's a couple of innovations coming from Meatball wiki, one developer has created a patch called: Shotgun spam filter which blocks edits containing more than three new external links. The developer admits that this gets a lot of false positives, and it doesn't display an explanatory message before refusing to save the edit.
More recently the same guy developed a patch for banning 'open proxies'. Banning the use of open proxies will help reduce the problem of WikiSpam, and other abusive editing on your wiki. However it is a controversial technique, which can potentially block out legitimate users.
Another option is to migrate to oddmuse, which has some better anti-spam features.
Some more info: UseMod:WikiSpam#admins
See also general AntiSpamRecommendations
RichardP - 2005-08-22 14:24 UTC
Yeah could be a problem. I have reworded that accordingly. But hopefully someone will test this out on usemod 1.0 soon (and feed back their info to the patch page). It surprises me that usemod people have been so slow coming up with a basic content banning patch. – Halz - 2005-08-22 15:20 UTC
Hello, during last few months I released some bugfix releases for UseMod. Latest one was 1.0.3. In 1.0.2 I added UseMod:WikiPatches?/RobotsNoFollow?. I'm currently evaluating different anti spam measures on the UseModWiki?. Almost all spam during the last 5-6 weeks on UseModWiki? seems to be from the same spam bot.
– UseMod:MarkusLude?