[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] spam at maemo wiki

[From: Steve Landers]

On 12/09/2006, at 4:39 PM, Frantisek Dufka wrote:

> Ferenc Szekely wrote:
>
>> Disabling anonymous edits would be temporary only, since it is  
>> against
>> the idea of the wikis.
>
> I don't mind fixing the frontpage few times until proper solution  
> is implemented (challenge/response looks ideal). I would disable  
> anonymous logins only when situation gets worse.
>
> Personally if site (blog, wiki, forum) wants registration from me  
> for posting casual comments/hints/suggestions/corrrections I think  
> twice and then just forget it.

This is the reason why those of us who maintain the Tclers Wiki  
(http://wiki.tcl.tk) have avoided logins so far, although the topic  
comes up regularly.

Our attitude is that it is like a shop window - sure you'll get some  
vandalism from time to time, but you don't want to "board it up" and  
create barriers to people contributing.

The Tclers Wiki is one of the bigger Wiki's around (containing tens  
of thousands of pages) and there are a couple of things that we do to  
minimise the pain from Spammers.

The first (and perhaps most significant) is to include  
'rel="nofollow"' in all links, and to prominently display the  
following message on all edit pages

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(in case the mailing list software filters the image, you can see it  
at http://mini.net/pub/nofollow.gif)

Most Wiki spammers seem to get the message - adding a URL to any page  
will not increase its page rank in Google.

The second measure is to make it trivially simple to revert to a  
previous version of a page. This means that spam is usually replaced  
very quickly (by anyone with the interest in doing so) and the  
spammers soon tire of playing the game. Of course, you need a simple  
way to roll forward too.

I'll leave others to judge whether these are appropriate to the Maemo  
wiki, but thought I'd share the experience in any case.

Steve

--
Steve Landers                     Software Design Solutions
Digital Smarties                  steve at DigitalSmarties.com
Perth, Western Australia          DigitalSmarties.com