[yapc] Time to freeze the wiki?

Michael Schwern schwern.michael at grantstreet.com
Wed Jun 30 00:45:37 CDT 2004


On Jun 29, 2004, at 10:40 PM, James Mastros wrote:
> As far as wiki spam protection plugins go, consider rejecting (with a 
> reasonable error message) pages containing new non-obfuscated links to 
> domains other then those on a whitelist of known domains.

Make linking hard.  Doesn't this sort of defeat the point of the world 
wide web?

And wouldn't it involve just as much work to answer requests to update 
the whitelist as it would be to remove the spam?  Worse, it now puts 
all the work on the wiki administrator rather than distributed amongst 
the users.  Wikis are supposed to be low cost to maintain.


> That should prevent spammers from getting any value out of it, if they 
> just want to improve their google rankings... and the only way to stop 
> profit-driven behavior like this, at least without finding them and 
> putting a motivitaion other then profit in them, which is hard, is to 
> make it no longer profitable.

And kill the value of the thing in the process.  It is a poison pill 
you propose.




More information about the yapc mailing list