Special:Badtitle/NS90:Forum:Wiki Talk/Recent new users/reply (3)

I too want to mine spambots' contributions for character names. I've worked with the MediaWiki API before, both in backing up other wikis that I admin and in the cleanup of Cracked wicks (most of which were changed to Cracked.com). Is there a way to identify which usernames in Special:ListUsers are "spambot" usernames, so that I can avoid misusing a real user's name? I could try /^[A-Z][a-z]+[A-Z][a-z]+$/ (regex for two-word camel case), but that would include TVT refugees who kept the same camel case username, and it would exclude that have only one name part, such as VGEBrittxyhee that I morphed into "Calla Britchihee".

But the reason we're getting signups like this in the first place is that our registration CAPTCHA is too easy for generalist MediaWiki spambots. I used to have pretty much exactly the same spambot registration pattern when I ran reCAPTCHA on my own wiki. But when I switched to a custom QuestyCaptcha whose questions each linked to a page containing the answer (e.g. What is Sam's last name in The Lord of the Rings?), spambot registrations plummeted.