Newest trend in wiki spam
I’ve found the newest trend in wiki spam seems to be to go after pages that don’t usually have content on them. Like category pages and talk pages connected to categories. Talk pages in general are popular, and I’ve also had quite a bit of spam coming to Talk:W/w/index.php
In the beginning I would just delete the pages, but the spammers would just come back. So I’ve taken to protecting those pages, THEN removing the comments by editing. At least then they’ll have to find other pages to vandalize.
February 22nd, 2007 at 1:17 am
I don’t seem to have gotten around to blogging this, but I noticed the same thing last time I cleaned out my honeypot wiki. Unused content pages have always been popular though, remember when they were after pages like the copyright and about pages which on many wikis are often blank.
March 9th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I don’t get why the sudden recent upsurge in wikispam to begin with - there was a massive decline after mediawiki went to using rel=nofollow by default, it stayed quiet for a year or two, and now suddenly it’s tooling back up again.
How dumb do you have to *be* to spam a page that embeds rel=nofollow on all links with spam in a hidden div?!
Especially when you’re specifically targeting the most popular wiki software out there, which DEFAULTS to rel=nofollow links right out of the box?
I seriously don’t understand how spammers can be smart enough to figure out how to use spam tools but dumb enough not to realize when they can’t possibly get any benefit out of doing it.
March 23rd, 2007 at 11:36 pm
A question: do you have any idea what spammers hope to achieve with spam that can’t even be seen except by editors? If it’s invisible, how will it hook even ONE ‘net newbie?