Wiki spam

I knew that subscribing to my own Wiki’s RSS feed would come in handy. I subscribe to the Recent Changes page on the Wiki just in case something like what I’m about to describe happens.

Some spammer created a page called RecentVisitors on my Wiki. That page (which is now deleted) is created on installations of PHPWiki (which I used to use; I’ve since switched to MediaWiki). It’s meant to be like a guestbook however the nature of the Wiki leaves it very open to abuse.

So this spammer created this page. He then added “Jacob from [some spammer’s site]” to the page. The page isn’t linked to or from any other page; I would have had to have known that it existed to find it. However since I subscribe to the RSS feed, it tells me every single change to the Wiki. I knew within the hour what had occurred and quickly deleted the page.

The whole point of these spams (spem?) is to increase the page rank of the linked site. Since more and more search engines are indexing blogs, comment spam is not going to go away. Though this is the first encounter I’ve had with Wiki spam, I’m sure it won’t be the last. If it becomes more of a problem then I’m going to have to investigate ways to lock that down. As much as I like Wiki’s (and it’s a lot), I can’t afford to have my own Wiki turn into a cesspool of spam links.

License

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