Wiki Spam
Ryan Vis wrote me a message to tell me about some Wiki spam that he had found on the New Orleans Wiki.
I was poking around some of the pages and found a spammer. I don’t know if you can block domains or have any anti-spam plugins for the wiki software, but I thought I’d let you know. The attached file is the markup I pulled out of the Pets page ( http://thinknola.com/wiki/Pets).
Thank you Ryan Vis, for calling attention to this problem.
What is Wiki spam?
What is Wiki spam? People who want more links to their web site will change a Wiki page to include links to their web site. The web site is usually a web site that exists only to sell some typical spam product, mortgages, pills, long distances service, etc. They don’t actually type out the links themselves. They will write programs that post automatically to Wikis.
Links are important because the link may increase their ranking in search engines, like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. A search engine will increase the relevance of a web site, by virtue of how many other web sites link to it.
I fact, most of the links do not display on the page. The spammer hides them so they only appear when someone looks at the page without any formatting. That someone is a search engine coming to read the side to put in the search engine.
The Wiki Garden
Simple. You need to do some gardening. As a volutneer, look at which pages changed recently, and check to make sure that there are no hidden links. If there are, you can roll back the changes. You need to pull these weeds from the Wiki.
Viewing Changes
To view the changes, click on the history table of the Wiki page that has changed. You see a list of all the versions of the Wiki page. Select two pages and click on the button that says “Compare selected versions.” You’ll see the older version and the newer version side by side, with the older version on the left. On the right, the color green indicates new text added to the article.
Rolling Back Spam
To rollback the changes, click on the history tab of the Wiki page that has been spammed. Click on the version prior to the version that has been spammed. Benieth the title of the article you’ll see text that says something like “Revision as of 05:02, 20 July 2006; view current revision.” To revert to this revision, click the edit tab at the top of the page, and then click “Save changes.”
What you have done is you’ve edited the older version, but you’ve not made any changes. When you clicked save, you saved that older version over the newer version.
Become a Gardener
Let me know if you would like to keep an eye on the Wiki with me. If you find some spam and roll it back, you can let me know, and I’ll go look at your changes, and block the addresses of the spammers you caught.
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I’ll keep poking around; I pulled a ton of spam links off the homepage as well. Didn’t know about the rollback feature, though.. where do I turn in my Geek Card?
Oh, come now. I’m learning Wiki as I go. The New Orleans Wiki needs a lot of work, and some guidance. I’m hoping that you and Becky Houtman can create some guidelines.
I’m looking at the Wikipedia guidelines as a jumping off point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style
May as well go from there.
Hey, there. Testing my subscription plugin!
I got your message, hope that means your plug-in is working.
ryan do not turn in your card