: How can I block bots from creating MediaWiki accounts and articles? I created a new MediaWiki website, Speedypedia. It's currently in alpha in two languages - English and Hebrew. I also submitted

I created a new MediaWiki website, Speedypedia. It's currently in alpha in two languages - English and Hebrew. I also submitted my website to MediaWiki's directory of websites using MediaWiki, but this was a mistake - since then my English version is flooded with spambots and I had to protect it with a username & password. I even added a mathematical captcha but it didn't stop the bots. How can I block bots from my website, without making it hard for real humans, including those who are disabled? I prefer an invisible captcha, but since MediaWiki is used by thousands of websites, I'm not sure it's possible (maybe the bots already know how to cheat it).

By the way, there is no spam in my Hebrew version, why? Maybe the spam bots recognize the English language? How can I change my English version not to have spam too? Or maybe the bots only crawled the English list of websites using MediaWiki, I don't know. But I don't want to remove my website from this list, is there any other solution? I don't want users to edit pages anonymously, they have to create an account. Will it help if they will have to validate their email address? Currently email address is optional and they don't have to validate it.

I prefer not to block specific IP addresses, because I consider it Ipism.

I'm sorry if this question was already posted before, I found a similar question from 2011 on Stack Overflow, and it's closed, and its answers are not up to date.

Update: I removed my website from the English and Hebrew lists of sites using MediaWiki, and added it to the multilingual list.

I think this question is different than "How can I prevent spam on sites which I control?" because it's a specific question about MediaWiki, which is used in thousands of websites.

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