wiki spam!

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 12:49 PM, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
<ypod at mit.edu> wrote:
> It's becoming very annoying having to deal with spam (bots?) operating
> on the wiki, trying to blank wiki pages, like in the case of the following:
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Multi-hop_mesh_network_in_MIT_campus
>
> Is there a way to prevent that? Why not require user logins to make edits?

There are much less intrusive methods.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spam
External link spamming with bots

A few parties now appear to have a spambot capable of spamming wikis
from several different wiki engines, analogous to the submitter
scripts for guestbooks and blogs. They have a database of a few
hundred wikis. Typically they insert external links. Like blog spam,
their aim is to improve their search engine rankings, not to directly
advertise their product.

If you see a bot inserting external links, please consider checking
the other language wikis to see if the attack is widespread. If it is,
please contact a sysop on the Meta-Wiki; they can put in a
Wikimedia-wide text filter. Any Meta sysop can edit the Wikimedia-wide
spam blacklist to add or remove the patterns that are recognized by
the filter, with the changes taking effect immediately. New links can
also be added to the list if a new spammer should start making the
rounds.

Sysops are authorised to block unauthorised bots on sight. Spam bots
should be treated equivalently as vandalbots. Edits by spambots
constitute unauthorised defacement of websites, which is against the
law in many countries, and may result in complaints to ISPs and
(ultimately) prosecution.

The link spam problem extends far beyond Wikimedia projects, and is
generally worse on smaller wikis where the community struggles to keep
it clean. meta:Wiki Spam page [obsolete] has some more general
information and advice for users of wikis elsewhere on the internet,
while meta:Anti-spam Features [has been moved] describes features
available in MediaWiki (for administrators running this software)

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-spam_features
MediaWiki provides the following features to reduce the problem of Wiki Spam...


> p.
>
> --
> Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
> Graduate student
> Viral Communications
> MIT Media Lab
> Tel: +1 (617) 459-6058
> http://www.mit.edu/~ypod/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Devel mailing list
> Devel at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>



-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay