[yapc] Time to freeze the wiki?

[Rocco Caputo]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 08:03:43AM -0400, Michael Schwern wrote:
> On Jun 29, 2004, at 1:44 AM, Bill Odom wrote:
> >Some jerk keeps spamming the yapc kwiki. Is it time to freeze and 
> >archive
> >it? Or is there a better way to solve this problem?
> 
> Block the IP?

Hi!

IP blocking didn't help when I tried it with POE's wiki.  Spammers
would just switch addresses every few days.

The URLs would repeat, though, so I added content blocks.  Pages
couldn't be saved with known spam URLs.  This didn't last long.
Either the number of wiki spammers is increasing, or they just change
the URLs they post.

A week ago I made signups mandatory before pages could be edited.  So
far the spammers don't want to identify themselves (or maybe their
software can't handle cookies yet).  Wiki signups are trivial, though,
so I'm not counting on them to block spammers forever.

A lot of wiki spammers seem to be search engine "optimizer" companies.
They like wikis because the old page revisions tend to be indexed.
Scrubbing the spam off the visible site doesn't prevent search engines
from finding the old links and boosting the spammer's GoogleRank(tm).

The workaround I've read about (and added to POE's wiki) is to include

  <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" />

on past revisions of a page.  Seriously crossing my fingers there.

-- 
Rocco Caputo - http://poe.perl.org/