[x]Blackmoor Vituperative

Saturday, 2009-07-04

Preventing anonymous editing on MediaWiki

Filed under: Security,The Internet — bblackmoor @ 12:02

I use MediaWiki for a few web sites (Warlords of NUM and WestGuard, for example). Unfortunately, some lowlife scum like to post spam about luxury watches or viagra or whatnot on these sites, so I need to lock them down to prevent this.

The simplest way to do this is to 1) disable anonymous editing, and 2) disable account creation by anyone other than a sysop (which is to say, me). The MediaWiki manual explains how to do this (and a great many other things), but I thought it might be help for folks if I posted just those specific instructions here, since I think this is a common request for those using MediaWiki.

Simply add the following lines to the end of LocalSettings.php with a text editor such as Notepad++ (do not use Windows Notepad — use a real text editor):

## Customized settings begin here

# Disable anonymous editing
$wgGroupPermissions[‘*’][‘edit’] = false;

# Hide user tools for anonymous (IP) visitors
$wgShowIPinHeader = false;

# Prevent new user registrations except by sysops
$wgGroupPermissions[‘*’][‘createaccount’] = false;

And that’s that. You will probably also want to add a custom “wiki.png” logo. If so, you should add the path to it, like so (you will, of course, need to upload it to your site first):

## Customized settings begin here

# Custom logo
$wgLogo = ‘http://www.mymediawikiwebsite.org/skins/mycustomskin/wiki.png’;

# Disable anonymous editing
$wgGroupPermissions[‘*’][‘edit’] = false;

# Hide user tools for anonymous (IP) visitors
$wgShowIPinHeader = false;

# Prevent new user registrations except by sysops
$wgGroupPermissions[‘*’][‘createaccount’] = false;

And there you go.