Enabling account creation on the wiki

[x010]

I'm wondering what the views on the community are regarding the creation of accounts on this wiki.
As far as I remember, the wiki was locked down due to a exodus of spam in the beginning.

I'm an admin at two major Wikimedia wikis, and we successfully combat this issue using the abuse filter (Extension:AbuseFilter on MediaWiki). Both of these sites get far more views than this wiki does, and the spam level is reasonable. The reason that works is that those spammers are focused on creating links, and some simple regex handles them.

And if you really need to be restrictive, I think it won't hurt to give a couple of contributors bureaucrat status so that they can promote, check and block users.

I also see that import is restricted to admins, making it available to all users would likely be useful as that'll help when importing templates and the like from Wikimedia wikis (even simple one like infoboxes).

Just some thoughts from an inactive user who was pleasantly surprised to see some development on the Wiki (at least on the surface).
P.S: The MediaWiki version on the wiki is outdated; the latest version is 1.32.

[WILSON2bGg]

You really should be asking mrpijey in PMs not here

[ovctvct]

We use https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:QuestyCaptcha on BetaWiki and it works, when it doesn't the staff can always take manual action if required. That abuse filter needs individual filters and is prone to false positives of all sorts, so it requires time from the BA wiki staff, which hasn't been too active recently. It could be good for a large wiki, but BA wiki is essentially a small wiki.

[x010]

We use https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:QuestyCaptcha on BetaWiki and it works, when it doesn't the staff can always take manual action if required. That abuse filter needs individual filters and is prone to false positives of all sorts, so it requires time from the BA wiki staff, which hasn't been too active recently. It could be good for a large wiki, but BA wiki is essentially a small wiki.

You're right, that would also work for something like BetaArchive. That being said, the abusefilters we use are very effective (considering that IP users can edit there) - we do have a page where users report false positives, and the level is very much reasonable.