Increasing account creation threshold

Revision as of 18:02, 24 October 2012

There are cases when the Wikimedia Foundation or others will host events that have a tendency of creating a large amount of new account requests during a short window of time from a single IP or a few IPs. The IP can be effectively white listed to be excluded from rate limiting. This can easily be done if you add an $wmfThrottlingExceptions array in throttle.php (operations/mediawiki-config.git / wmf-config / throttle.php)

$wmfThrottlingExceptions[] = array(
       'from'   => '2012-10-06T00:00 +0:00',
       'to'     => '2012-10-06T23:59 +0:00',
       'IP'     => '12.183.19.7',
       'dbname' => array( 'enwiki', 'commonswiki' ),
       'value'  => '50',
);

After this you must sync the throttle with

sync-file wmf-config/throttle.php 

After this, if the event is in less than 72 hours, you should delete the memcache key by using

mwscript mcc.php --wiki=$wiki
> delete $wiki:acctcreate:ip:$ip
> exit

If the deletion is successful, no output will be shown.

If the IP is not known then you can also set wgAccountCreationThrottle to a value higher then 0

An example of this would be as follows in CommonSettings.php

if ( $wgDBname == 'idwiki' ) {
        # Account creation throttle disabled for outreach event
        # Contact: Siska Doviana <serenity@gmail.com>
        if ( time() > strtotime( '2008-08-08T08:00 +7:00' )
          && time() < strtotime( '2008-08-08T19:00 +7:00' ) )
        {
                $wgAccountCreationThrottle = 300;
        }
}