Mar 06 2005

I Love Wiki Spammers

Category: GeneralJeremy Wright @ 6:10 pm

This is now the 3rd wiki I’ve had to shut down this year because they’ve corrupted the entire database. Million-line edits with tens 0f thousands of links. Poof. Gone.

Bye bye ResumeWiki.

I’ll try and breathe life into you over the next few days, but I don’t anticipate much luck.

5 Responses to “I Love Wiki Spammers”

  1. Nathan Wong says:

    You had no backups?

  2. stillwaters says:

    Ouch. That’s too bad. It looks like a great idea.

  3. Jon Berg says:

    Is it not a common feature in wikis to have an easy way to revert back to some unspammified version. I think spam and vandalism almost make it impossible to run serious stuff in everybody can edit mode.

  4. Jeremy C. Wright says:

    Jon: Yep, totally normal. Problem is that this last spam attack was so large (literally a million lines) that it crashed the system.

    I often have to deal with wiki spam. It’s the worst kind. This is the worst I’ve ever seen.

  5. Steven Streight aka Vaspers the Grate says:

    I’ve fallen way behind on getting a wiki up. Now I’m wondering if I should slow down and wait.

    I mean, wiki spam I know is bad. I’ve seen wiki spam at Wikipedia.

    At SeedWiki, where I was going to start a wiki, I saw so many that looked abandoned.

    The Revert Edit, is not always available?

    Could you require registration for users to edit, like over at New PR/Wiki of Constantin Basturea?

    I know a lot about comment spam, RSS spam, trackback spam, etc., but not much about wiki spam.

    How can wiki spam best be prevented?

    I’m guessing: via registration with admin approval, including an email confirmation. Edit moderation?

    Stopping spambots from invading a wiki, this seems relatively easy, no?