Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Seems like the spammers have found the web equivalent of an smtp open relay.
For example: [http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks/DOWNLOAD/sb/index.htm sitz bath] [http://www.buddy4u.com/view/?u=monophonic+ringtone monophonic ringtone] [http://www.buddyprofile.com/viewprofile.php?username=nextelringtone nextel ringtone]
Things like this make nofollow more attractive all the time. Has there ever been any discussion on perhaps allowing a white-list for non-spam sites that we won't no-follow? This would be useful for wikis who don't want to kill all their externals with no-follow.
As a general policy, this would be inappropriate use of user pages on Wikimedia projects and I wouldn't hesitate to delete conent of this nature immediately if found, block the user account, and seek a checkuser scan to block the IP address as well (if it were initiated from a registered user account). Link spamming has been a persistant problem on Wikimedia projects anyway, although there has been some efforts to try and root that problem out by preventing new users and anonymous ip addresses from adding external links to pages.
In term of general spamming and such, yeah, the internet is a far different place than it was 15 years ago when I got my first regular internet e-mail account and was involved with USENET. Spam has all but completely killed that service. I wish the various ISPs were more agressive in policing their users against this sort of activity, but it is economically useful to ignore that spamming even occurs with their accounts.