[Openmcl-devel] wiki spam

[Gary Byers]

On Tue, 2 Nov 2004, John Wiseman wrote:

> I see the OpenMCL wiki (<http://openmcl.clozure.com/openmcl-wiki/>)
> is being overrun by spammers.  Are there any wiki experts around
> that know of good ways to deal with this problem?
>
>
> John
>

Yuck; thanks for pointing this out (and thanks to anyone else who's
tried to clean any of this up in the last few days.)

The Moin wiki's own wiki has some suggestions and tools:

<http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/CategorySpam?highlight=%28spam%29>

I'll look into installing the content filter mentioned there, but
I don't know if that's a really viable solution.

Other (much larger) sites have apparently been experiencing similar
problems lately.  If automated, high-volume wiki spam is a relatively
new phenomenon, it's probably safe and wise to assume that it'll get
worse.

The mailing list approach (where you have to subscribe to the list to
post to it) is sometimes inconvenient, but it's done a good job of
keeping spam off of the mailing lists.

Having to register somehow (e.g., provide a valid email address) to
gain write access to the wiki kind of goes against the spirit of
wikis, but leaving it wide open to spam like this is probably
hopelessly naive.