Wiki and Spam

How do people handle of spam on a public wiki ?

The WildIndia Wiki has been getting a lot of spam the last few months. I have been cleaning them up regularly, but in the last one week, while I was out of town, there was a big flood of it and almost all the articles have been edited to include spam links. Check out the Recent Changes. I’d hate to make it moderated (is there a way to do it in mediawiki ?) and yet, want to keep the spam away. I know lot of you folks use Mediawiki out there and want to hear, how you guys handle spam.

13 Comments

  1. klooloola · April 3, 2006 Reply

    surely you can code it up?

    if the post has a link scrape the “link target page” for keywords like cialis and ban.
    add link target to ban list.
    posts without links can be permitted always.

  2. louiswu · April 3, 2006 Reply

    Assume you saw this. Not too helpful?

  3. jbritto · April 3, 2006 Reply

    I used to have the same problem with a wiki I have (pmwiki-by default anyone can edit by just entering a username). Finally got annoyed and made it uneditable except by a few usernames.

    If the spam is mostly done by automated crawlers (as was mine), you could try introducing a captcha…

  4. tariquesani · April 3, 2006 Reply

    Try processing the diffs of edits thru Akismit http://akismet.com/ – it works like magic on Comment and trackback spam. Should work for wiki as well. Yes it does involve writing a bit of code…. Interested?

  5. adarsh_bhat · April 3, 2006 Reply

    Make login complusory for edits.

  6. swaroopch · April 3, 2006 Reply

    Disable anonymous editing.

  7. Anonymous · April 4, 2006 Reply

    Use a “secret” keyword

    I had tons of automated spam comments on my blog until I added a new field to the comment-creation form. It said “Enter Jeffrey’s first name”, and provided a textbox. Humans enter “Jeffrey” but spambots don’t. So far (several months) it’s stopped 100% of the spam, which had reached the dozens-a-day level.

  8. hserus · April 4, 2006 Reply

    1. Disable creation of users except by an admin
    2. Allow only users to edit the wiki articles

    Right at the end of your LocalSettings.php file –

    suresh@frodo 11:45:01 [~]$ grep wgGroupPermissions public_html/wiki/LocalSettings.php
    $wgGroupPermissions[‘*’ ][‘read’] = true;
    $wgGroupPermissions[‘*’ ][‘edit’] = false;
    $wgGroupPermissions[‘*’ ][‘createaccount’] = false;

    * is a default group that maps to “anybody without an account on the wiki”

  9. Anonymous · April 4, 2006 Reply

    ICICI bank security

    Oops! Kindly put up your talks on ICICI security issues on-line. There’s lots riding on it for me, I’m sure there are lot of others out there like me who can’t afford to have their bank balance disappear on ‘fine’ morning.

  10. admin · April 4, 2006 Reply

    Kickass. thanks for the info.. will push in the changes 🙂

  11. achitnis · April 5, 2006 Reply

    Security != moderation

  12. Anonymous · May 15, 2008 Reply

    Its amazing, but not impossible to find it.

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