The wiki spammer’s wiki
Yesterday I wrote about Oleg Popov, who spammed my wiki.
Today I did some more digging, and found a wikispam he’d done while logged in as a user (Xx, a user name he often uses). Turns out he’s spamming by hand. While checking the user page, I noticed there was a user named OlegPopov. Heh, he’s been very busy.
He’d written a nice bio, and included a link to his wiki…
His wiki is a good idea and well executed. He’s even attracted very capable users.
The problem is the concept of a wiki spammer owning a directory of wikis…
I’m sure you guys can see the possible ramifications of that?
June 23rd, 2005 at 1:57 pm
“Oleg” did overdo the messages, it seems. But he or she hasn’t been back to wiki4all since its first week, nor (fortunately) has he or she taken it down. So that’s a bit of a mystery. But as the site is non-commercial, apparently, and took several hours’ work for no apparent reward, it seems to be at the outer edges of the “Spam” region, possibly not even qualifying for the term in some respects.
Kind regards
Robin
June 23rd, 2005 at 2:23 pm
Oleg is a spammer, but the wiki is legit, in that you guys are the ones actually running it.
His profiles on maybe hundreds of wikis were over the top, but still useful to the wiki owners.
In other words, I’m not calling that spam.
It’s the juxtaposition of wiki spammmer owning a wiki directory that worries me.
Update: Hmmm… I’m starting to wonder about this. What if he intended to have a wiki that seemed legit, then fill it with spam. Problem is, you guys showing up meant he would be unable to get away with spamming his own wiki.
Just speculating. I don’t know what his motives were. It’s also possible that it didn’t become the success he’d hoped for in terms of traffic, or that the templates didn’t lend themselves to commercial contents (ads and text links).
June 23rd, 2005 at 4:32 pm
He could point people to wikis he spams. (Did I win??)
June 23rd, 2005 at 4:41 pm
Hehe, we could have fun for weeks trying to figure out what his REAL motive was. In the meantime, I really hope Robin and the gang can take over that wiki for real. Oleg pulled a disappearing act on them…
June 23rd, 2005 at 11:58 pm
This may seem redundand now, but I just have to say it (again): It seems quite obvious to me (and I guess to KC) that this guy managed to get the wiki crowd to maintain a list of spam targets for him. He can sit back and watch the list grow, you might as well call that a “disappearing act”.
June 24th, 2005 at 9:19 am
He certainly got some top wiki people very interested in his wiki. I am not so sure his aim was to build a list of spam targets, though that is certainly a good possibility and is working really well if that was his goal. If it was, this is a good way to target topical spam to appropriate wikis. That is certainly an advance in wiki spam methods that might help get around some of Google’s antispam measures.
But I wonder if he is trying a new method for web and referrer spam. Many spammers are getting into custom search engine and link pages so they have lots of links and pages to show up in Google and hoping people will link back to them. Once this wiki becomes popular it would be a good place to put Ad Sense and other ads on it. And once popular, the PageRank would be a useful tool for him. He could post links to his spammy pages in the correct catagory. And since he is the admin he can link to whatever sites he wants and it can’t be called wiki spam. And users visiting the other sites listed on the wiki will be sending out legitimate referrers back to the site. Since spammers seem to believe referrer spam is really useful that would seem to make sense.
After writing all that I realized, MediaWiki by default sets nofollow on external links and this wiki is using that default. So there can be no PageRank benifit to any spammy sites linked to from the wiki. That either shows that wasn’t his motivation or spammers really don’t understand nofollow (we have other evidence that many don’t seem to).
It is also possible that he has realized all the damage he has done to the wiki world and this is his way of making amends. I really doubt it though.
June 24th, 2005 at 9:51 am
He has shown by his actions a few days ago that he doesn’t understand Nofollow. And I had another idea inspired by yours, Joe. What if he intended to put links into the templates of the wiki?
Or he intended to do a bait and switch?
Who knows.
June 24th, 2005 at 10:11 am
Bait and switch wouldn’t supprise me, but it seems like a lot of work to get the wiki going and thriving just to get a little PageRank later. As many others do, why not just buy up a recently expired domain if your after free PageRank. This site is never going to have a high PageRank, it has too many outgoing links and almost no other content.
June 24th, 2005 at 11:10 am
Or how about encouraging the creation of more wikis. Which would mean more wikis to spam?