Spam in MediaWiki

Problem

Spam: Hidden content is added to your website.

Why? Money of course. Spammers are being paid by companies wanting to increase their Google ranking. From Google: "... webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages ..."

Why bother if it's hidden?

Because spam is compromising your Google ranking. From Google: "... Quality guidelines - specific guidelines: * Avoid hidden text or hidden links. ..."

Solution

Captcha

Patch MediaWiki with a Captcha. See http://wiki.seds.org/index.php/MediaWiki:Captcha.

Report spam to Google

Go to Report a Spam Result.

See also

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_in_blogs

"Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments, promoting commercial services, to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly-accessible online discussion boards."

Journal

20061020

Spambots have automatically created logins and added hidden content:

<div style="display:none">
<p>[We are delicate. We do not delete your content.]
[l_sp896]
<a href="http://..." class='external text' title="http://.../" rel="nofollow">...</a>
<a href="http://..." class='external text' title="http://.../" rel="nofollow">...</a>
<a href="http://..." class='external text' title="http://.../" rel="nofollow">...</a>
...
</p>
</div>

20061024

Positive: MediaWiki-1.6.7 already places attribute 'rel=nofollow' in the link. This attribute makes search engines ignore the link. Negative: This makes the spam ever more useless and clogging my wiki... >:-|

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