On 2013-11-18 3:57 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
On 14/11/13 22:51, Daniel Friesen wrote:
Unfortunately I don't know of any actual statistical test anyone's done comparing the amout of spam made on a wiki with and without nofollow. Or other anti-spam tools.
I couldn't find any useful statistics after a bit of web searching. It would be interesting to set up two wikis, and get one of them listed on "dofollow" lists such as these:
http://www.blackhatlists.com/view-item/52/352-DoFollow-Wikis-List.html http://www.milanchymcak.com/blog/fresh-dofollow-wiki-list-download-updated-dofollow-wiki-list-for-free http://www.blackhatgroup.com/f8/%5Bget%5D-list-do-follow-wiki-sites-105103.html
... and leave the other one off them, and see which gets more spam. I gather the actual spambots are stupid and wouldn't notice whether the wiki actually has nofollow enabled, but getting a wiki included on these crawler-generated lists may have some impact.
-- Tim Starling
If we're going to go and leave a wiki off the list we might as well make it 4 wikis (on list but nofollow, on list and dofollow, off list and nofollow, off list and dofollow) to get proper data not skewed by the settings. In addition to data on whether the dofollow list increases spam we can also get some data both on whether bots using dofollow lists actually test for nofollow as well as if it makes a difference for public wikis not originally on the list.
Ideally long term we should be running honeypots running a variety of anti spam tools. Watching what kind of spam gets sent. What bots and types of spam bypass the different tools. etc... Project Honeypot (https://www.projecthoneypot.org/) runs a bunch but they're not wikis, they're not monitoring our types of spam or data about the bots we get.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]