concerning spam see also:
One message to the SpamBusters and 20 minutes later the the ghost spectre’s remainings are removed.
A mailing list would be useful for that and a wikipage. And pages SpamBusters on other wiki and logs that link here would be useful. – 040707 MattisManzel
As an aside, would anyone like to voluteer to help clean up the XP-France wiki? http://xp-france.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?DernieresNouvelles A chinese spammer replaced the contents of about two dozen pages. I don’t have the energy to clean up this one by hand. Usemod makes it too slow to restore previous version, plus Google still fetches the old versions anyway, so it still helps the spammer.
I’m not trying to offload work on others, but here are some other wikis that have been hit particularly hard:
Done – MattisManzel 2004-07-16 10:20 UTC
Is there anything like the secure email thing on moinmoin here [MailTo?(you AT isp DOT where)]?
Heh. This reminds me of when Meatball saved Zwiki from the pr0n-posting Slashdot vandal. – SunirShah
SpamBusters should use a realtime communication system like an IRC channel #spambusters to coordinate their actions. They should agree on who does what work, like x does pages from a - e, y from f - o, z from p - z or similar, depending on the dammage on a wiki or log or whatever open. They should exchange knowledge about the respective wiki-engine (or log or …) and how to prevent messing up or destroying contents on the wiki (or log …).
There are advantages and disadvantages to the idea.
Spam is a problem exceeding wiki. The global flashmobbers have it on their log now and all should go together. SpamIsInformation, maybe, but before analysing it let’s first remove it from our workshops. And that’s easier and more interesting if we do it together. http://www.flashmob.fm/forum/viewtopic.php?t=150
This is about the health of the collective creature. Spam is the bacteria and virus trying to infect it. SpamBusters is the autoimmune-system. It detects, locates and reacts on infections within the whole body. Has there been direct searching for spam on writeable open things like wiki and logs yet? This could be automatized I guess. Spam search engine. You enter the spam and it tells you all open writeable things that are infected, it tells you which places someone has already volunteered to remove the spam and what’s still to be done. Removal, report and analysis of new infections and direct search for new infections must be one smooth and permanent process. Visionstuff, just start: How could direct search for spam be done?
Regarding the body: Who wants to join joins and everybody is free to decide what to do. There should be no comandership needed when a central software tool for finding spam and organising the removal works well. Wiki and log-users all over should here and now spend half an hour on removing spam and by that keep up the health of the common body. Just a bit of jogging, know?
How serious a problem is spam on logs right now?
Nice to see a SpamBusters page - Being new to the wiki culture, i am a bit sad to see the killing effect of spam. But its like the real world; idiots everywhere. Despamming is not my favourite sport, but when feeling like supporting the community of wiki’s, a SpamBusters thing is the place to go to find wiki’s that need some support. - But currently is the wiki i mostly monitor (OpenWiki) under heavy seo spamming attack, so not much patience right now to massivly help despamming other sites. Nice initiativ --/sEi
I will add a link to your SpamBusters page on my blog. I hope you get enough people interested in helping out to make this a powerful weapon against spammers. It shouldn’t take too many people and there are a number of active wikispam fighters out there already. Wiki cleanup is pretty easy once you are familiar with the different wiki interfaces, it just takes time to undo large amounts that the spammer can do in a few seconds. Its been a little while since I have done much cleaning myself, but when I run across some I usually try to do what I can. --Joe@chongqed_org