Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on August 12, 2005 12:27 AM
I run a fair number of wikis (somewhere in the region of 20), all with a low turnover, so I guess you'd call them "ghost" wikis, although they have useful info on them.
We've solved the spam problem by having all changes mailed to a small group of checkers. In the rare case where the change is spam, one of the checkers will just revert the page. Average time for spam to survive is an hour or so.
We also noticed that the spammers were using humans to edit the pages - I can imagine some sort of sweatshop in China filled with people editing wikis. So CAPTCHAS are NOT going to work, contrary to the advice in the article.
Spammers also come from searches like "wiki sandbox" on Google. We have added a robots.txt file so that our sandbox pages are hidden from Google. This seriously reduced the number of spammers arriving.
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WikiSpam - a solved problem for us
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on August 12, 2005 12:27 AMWe've solved the spam problem by having all changes mailed to a small group of checkers. In the rare case where the change is spam, one of the checkers will just revert the page. Average time for spam to survive is an hour or so.
We also noticed that the spammers were using humans to edit the pages - I can imagine some sort of sweatshop in China filled with people editing wikis. So CAPTCHAS are NOT going to work, contrary to the advice in the article.
Spammers also come from searches like "wiki sandbox" on Google. We have added a robots.txt file so that our sandbox pages are hidden from Google. This seriously reduced the number of spammers arriving.
Rich.
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