Discussions/WikiSpam

WikiSpam

The question, of course, is "what can we do?" The Admin can always IPban the offender, but IPbans risk catching innocent folks in the same area, and might not even work in some cases (dynamically distributed IPs, etc.) The problem as I see it is that a wiki's strength is also its weakness: anyone can edit any page. It would be very hard to stop things like this without taking away the freedom that the wiki provides.

Does anyone here have any ideas or comments?

The Easy Way to Despam Pages

1. Go to the page with the spam on it.
2. At the bottom of the page, locate the "View Other Revisions" link, and click on it.
3. You will be presented with a numbered list of recent changes to that particular page. Find the last revision that was made before the spammer changed the page. Where it says "Revision #Whatever", there should be a link. Click that link.
4. You will be directed to a page that looks exactly the way the spammed page looked before it had spam on it. Go to the bottom of that page, and click "Edit text of this page".
5. You will be directed to an edit page. You don't have to make any changes; just click "Save". (You may wish to save the edit as major, with a message to the effect of "this page was formerly spammed", so that other despammers won't waste time checking to see if it's still spammed.)
6. The page should now be exactly as it was before it was spammed. Good for you!

Comments

Back to the despamming issue. What's worse, having a RecentChanges full of ip addresses, or having the same list with "fixed spam" messages? The list will be the same length reguardless, why not save people the trouble of clicking through 50+ messages during major attacks to check them?
-- DarkWolff

I generally try to only do it when the spam edit is the top one(so the Recent Changes entries stack. Honestly, I kinda hate that feature,(it would be nice if there was some indication when it happend, like "-- 3 distinct edits" or something). That way it wouldn't seem like changes got lost. But it has some uses. I try to use it to convert spam on Recent Changes so people know to ignore them. -FlowsLikeBits

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Wouldn't help - all of the recent spam runs have come through a tool that switches to a new proxy every edit. I lowered the threshold of new hyperlinks back below 3 yesterday, and nothing's got through since. There have been about 200 more (rejected) attempts in the last 24 hrs though. ~ Xyphoid

Heh, that comment's actually from before you put in the new anti-spam measures (And before we'd encountered shifting ips) - someone musta shuffled it about when they were adding their input here. I like the new stuff, and it seems to work semi-well as long as the number-of-possibles doesn't get shifted again, so keep up the good work.

In the interest of cleanliness I've removed some of the older commentary that referred to pre-switchover spam and some other stuff. View Old Revisions to check it out if you're interested. ~BerserkSeraph

I've noticed something. The page-spammers seem to typically not select minor edits and do not enter in summaries for their changes. One method of at least slowing them down would be to require all major edits to have a summary. To further slow them down, one could disallow copy-pastes in the 'summary' box (assuming this is possible without java). Additionally, there might be a "Gnome On" option for the Recent Changes page which lists all minor edits by users who are not logged in. - Arafelis isn't sure where to put these ideas.