Wikimaniawiki is a wiki for the Wikimania conferences where people generally arrive via links from the WMF family of wikis (announcements, wikilinks, etc.) The wiki generally only has the populace editing during conference time, much of the other time it is the woke crowd tidying up post-, or creating pre-conference.
Wikimaniawiki currently has direct account creations that appear to be just from spambots
- last 500 direct account creations https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=logevents&leaction=newusers/create&leprop=user%7Ctimestamp&lelimit=500 shows a spambot riot
- (noting that there may be one or two real accounts there, I will try to check more thoroughly)
- (Of course I am unable to tell whether these creations are API-based or through the solving of the captcha, and I will leave that to the experts to identify that and even whether that is a useful view of spambots.)
In a brief conversation with @Reedy he mentioned that we could explore what may be possible and that included
- might need to change a few messages and similar to point people to register elsewhere
- an audit trail/trackability
- the ability to re-activate the create account function in the lead-up and during a conference
I wondered about the ability to even just redirect the create account to meta, and then return, but that was my just wondering.