On 1/21/07, John Doe phoenixoverride@gmail.com wrote:
regarding this HAVE YOU NO CLUE what spam is? there have been massive attacks by spammers recently there was one user that added 142 links to the same site, the reason? to increase the sites rank in google. as for blog, myspace.com the reason is simple there is no need to link to jimbobs blog as per my reasoning at WT:EL Betacommand
On 1/21/07, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
I've brought this up at the talk page at [[Wikipedia:External links]] and ended up with more contempt than actual answers, so maybe some people in the know will be nice enough to actually clear some things up for us.
- If we're going to blindly attach "nofollow" to all the external
links, why are we allowing Wikia links to be propped up artificially? Are we in the business of conflict of interest now?
- Myspace blogs were recently added to the spam blacklist by Raul per
request of Jimbo, although no one else seems to know why, how, or per what rationale. I won't pretend to know what Jimbo's been up to past not having edited Wikipedia since the is-it-or-is-it-not-a decree, but perhaps some more explanation on this would be worthwhile? Seems like we're blocking a shitload of otherwise worthwhile primary source material for many of our articles for the sake of...well...nothing. Meanwhile, a blog ''not'' hosted on MySpace is still a-okay, which is patently absurd on its face. I'm wondering what the thought process was on this, since no one else seems to want to chime in.
- Did you folks know we have a bot that reverts links that are
arbitrarily considered spam? I didn't until today. [[User:Shadowbot1]]. I convinced him to post the blacklist where we could see it, and while some (most?) are useful, others are pretty screwy, and I'm not sure this is helpful in the long run.
I'm starting to think that our focus on spam is becoming a problem rather than a benefit to the project. How much collateral damage are we willing to accept in the project to take care of this "problem" that people think is massive? One out of every 10? 5% poor hits? Do we have some sort of measurement we're using here?
Let's assume for the moment that everyone reading knows what spam is and what the level of spam problem is for WP.
What we don't all know, is enough about what's being done about it, and how it's implemented.
As that can bite anyone, and in particular more experienced editors and admins working on problem issues, it might be better if there was more communications regarding anti-spam measures taken...