If you've ever set up a fresh MediaWiki and tried to leave it open to editing,
you'll know about the problem of wiki spam. There's various well documented tricks
to tackle the problem on your own wiki (although it seems to me that some of these are
becoming less effective over time. Particularly reCaptcha)
But wiki spammers are behaving in a staggeringly inconsiderate and anti-social way, and
I've often thought we should explore stronger ways of delivering some fight back.
Looking at spam across many wikis e.g. by googling "mediawiki ugg boots" we
could do more internet-wide spam cleanup somehow.
But recently I came across something, actually by looking at one the spam links. Take a
look at this: sickseo.co.uk/off-page-seo.html This video shows the use of a tool called
'SENuke Xcr' and another one called 'Ultimate Demon' to perform
"Off site SEO" ...that's "spamming" to you and me.
I've always known spammers used tools like this, but seeing this instructional video
gives me new insights into what we're up against. Also see the discussion taking place
on
forum.edwinsoft.com I find it amazing how oblivious these people seem to be, to how
annoying their activities are for people running websites. Never do they mention the word
spam, or have an inkling that they may be doing something ethically questionable.
Do you think we should try to contact them and explain that they are behaving badly? Maybe
on these forums. Maybe we'd have to spam them back repeatedly with such messages as
they get removed by the admins. And on youtube do you think we can get videos like this
removed? We can at least comment on them and vote them down (Youtube finds quite a lot of
similar videos) How about unleashing a bit of "ethical hacking" e.g. DDOS
attacks on people distributing this software? Really I'm amazed at how they're
getting away with this spamming out in the open these days.
Halz
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Halz