[lug] Dealing with wiki spam: the BLUG wiki, moinmoin and mediawiki

[Neal McBurnett]

The BLUG wiki is completely broken at the moment - even "recent
changes" is nothing but spam.

 http://lug.boulder.co.us/Wiki/FrontPage

It seems to me that it is hard for ordinary users to roll back spam on
moinmoin-based wikis - they have to actually edit out the changes by
hand.  But there appears to be a partial solution for moinmoin-based
wikis here: http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/AntiSpamGlobalSolution

It is based on a community of wikis that maintain a list of
disreputable urls that are linked to by wiki spammers, and then "Any
save with links that match one of those regular expressions will be
denied".

Mediawiki is better at dealing with spam.  I've been running a
mediawiki-based wiki for 6 months, and have found it easy to explain
to people how to help deal with spam - just a matter of four clicks.
And it is only a matter of two clicks for an admin to roll back a
spammy edit.  I have mozilla automatically load "recent changes" every
day, and have rather easily dealt with spam once a week or so.

 http://www.uuism.net/uuwiki/index.php/UUWiki:How_to_revert_a_page_to_an_earlier_version

Moinmoin and mediawiki have different markup languages.  I don't know
if there is a relatively easy way to migrate from one to the other.
But I note there are efforts to converge towards a standard for markup:

 http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiMarkupStandard

Other wiki spam pages:

 http://www.chongqed.org/

 http://wiki.chongqed.org/WikiSpam
                             
 http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2004-December/002666.html 

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett                 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
Signed and/or sealed mail encouraged.  GPG/PGP Keyid: 2C9EBA60
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