As every wiki admin, I had to deal with spam. Speaking about it with my friend Mathieu, he told me about a simple but very efficient idea using captchas to block spam bots from altering the wiki. Captchas are randomly-generated images that display a string user has to type in to make sure she is a human. As a computer cannot easily decipher semi-obfuscated text printed on an image, it is easy to block programs ... and then spam bots.

As this scratched my itch, I quickly hacked a proof-of-concept patch for phpwiki ... which was accepted today!

Now I can't wait for a new upstream release. :-)