Francois Zaninotto
The fame of the symfony project was a great appeal to spammers, especially since we provided a wiki and a bug tracker open to anonymous contributions.
Lately, all the pages of the wiki got methodically spammed and an average of 5 spam tickets were created every day. Unfortunately, the anti-spam protection of the trac software isn't mature and secure enough to be used. Besides, we all know that it's just a matter of time before a spam protection gets cracked.
So the inevitable happened today: The anonymous contributions to the wiki and bug trackers are now closed. All contributions require a trac account, which we provide to anyone requesting it by email at webmaster at symfony project dot com. You can suggest a login and a password in your email.
We hope it won't reduce the amount of public contributions to symfony, but we couldn't possibly keep on cleaning the trac everyday like that. Our apologies for the inconvenience, and welcome to all the new trac users.
Even with the undeniable fame of Symfony, it's nowhere near Mozilla. So it sort of makes me wonder how the Mozilla folks do it... :(
How about adding CAPTCHA? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha)
Or even better, HOT CAPTCHA - http://www.hotcaptcha.com :)
Besides the fact that CAPTCHAs are not friendly towards visually impaired persons, they are also potentially as much of a deterent to spammers as you might think. Check out http://sam.zoy.org/pwntcha/ for more information on ways in which people are breaking CAPTCHAs.