Just an arb post about something that’s always at the back of my mind: wiki spam. A wiki spammer is someone (usually a bot, not a real person) who makes your life hell by wiping out your pages and replacing them with viagra links. Often they do it subtly, by using the Discussion page, where you might not notice, or by making their links ‘hidden’ from viewers, but visible to search engines. I know this because I saw it happen when I was using MediaWiki in 2006.
Spam bots have advanced over the years, and it’s no longer sufficient to require users to have a login in order to edit. Spammers can create their own logins. I still need to find a solution for this. One thing I can do is block certain countries from editing the wiki. Most Unisa students are from South Africa, and all spam I’ve experienced originates from other countries, so I could just block them. Simple! Turkey and Singapore (and a couple of neighbouring countries) are the main culprits. I doubt there are any Unisa students living there, so blocking these countries won’t inconvenience anybody.
Here’s what my wiki books have to say about wiki spam:
From page 329 of MediaWiki:
In “Block User” on page 150, we discussed how to ban users from the wiki. Administrators have other tools at their disposal. If your wiki is a victim of spam user accounts created by bots, consider adding a CAPTCHA to the create account page. The ConfirmEdit extension, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit, is one of the most popular.
From page 128 of Wiki Web Collaboration:
An increase in the frequency of wiki spam (as well as spam in blogs, forums and guest books) has become evident. The reason lies in the assessment of pages by search engines. The more external links lead to a hit, the higher that page is ranked. The assumption is that a well-linked site is most probably relevant to many people. To receive as many links as possible, spammers place a mass of external links to their homepage in the wikis, blogs, etc. It does not matter that these entries will be deleted soon after; the important thing is that a certain percentage of such links are still online when the search engine robots visit a site.
From page 154 of How Wikipedia works:
Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, which means that search engines do not take into account whether a site is linked to from Wikipedia when they calculate rankings. From a search engine optimization standpoint, including a site in a Wikipedia article has no benefit. This decision was made in order to discourage zealous webmasters from trying to use Wikipedia to boost their sites.
PS. In my book, a Unisa student asking for past exam papers on the wiki is also a spammer!
LOL, that would explain the times I was unable to access the site from Turkey. Just checking the build up to the wiki to get a better idea of mediawiki actually, thought I just had to comment on the “spam from Turkey” discussion.