[pydotorg-www] Jython wiki is still getting spammed

[Paul Boddie]

On Tuesday 26 April 2011 17:00:27 A.M. Kuchling wrote:
>
> If that's so, I don't know what can be done about this, other than
> making the textchas harder or just restricting editing of the Jython
> wiki to a limited list of people, which might be OK if the Jython
> community agrees -- not many people edit the wiki.

I've seen this kind of spamming on other Wikis, but banning the users and 
blacklisting their sites keeps the spamming down somewhat. This is, after 
all, nothing like some really aggressive spamming I saw once where there 
would be tens of pages created or changed per day, all involving content 
containing strings of hexadecimal- or base64-like values.

On occasions like this, I wish address-blocking were more readily pursuable 
with Moin, since the spamming appears to involve the same IP address, and 
I've seen edits from hosted servers being used for spamming. But maybe better 
textchas might be the answer - the Python Wiki seems to manage just fine on 
that basis.

> We could add rel=nofollow to the links to deny the spammers pagerank,
> but are they sophisticated enough to notice?  (They certainly aren't
> noticing that we delete pages pretty quickly.)

I don't think spammers care: they create new pages that aren't really linked 
to from the rest of the site (apart from via RecentChanges and other dynamic 
pages/content); it's all an attempt to feed search engines in some way, 
whether there's an actual effect or not. As long as they can create pages on 
a site, they'll just do it as a write-only activity.

Paul