[Catalyst] Wiki spam

[Shlomi Fish]

On Friday 07 April 2006 18:03, Wade.Stuart at fallon.com wrote:
> catalyst-bounces at lists.rawmode.org wrote on 04/07/2006 09:54:40 AM:
> > Kiki wrote:
> > > The wiki got spammed too (about 2-3 hours ago). It's a weird kinda
>
> spam:
> > > invisible (by css) "googly" referral links spam. Looks like the work of
> > > a not too bright bot (only standard trac wiki pages got spammed). The
> > > spammers IP address is: 212.106.129.12. Disabling anonymous edits was
> > > considered but not enforced due to the inability of the Trac wiki to
> > > allow automated sign-up of users.
>
> This is not new I have cleaned up the wikistart from this invis div crap a
> few times now.
>
> One thing we need to remember though,  the spammers win even when we clear
> the page -- the history page still
> links all of those old spam links in.  I know for a fact google's engine
> runs a blacklist that lowers a site's rank when
> there are a bunch of blacklisted links on it -- so it hurts our site as
> well.

You can prevent the spammers from winning by making sure all external links 
are marked with the rel="nofollow" attribute. This will hopefully also 
prevent them from spamming in the future. All my wikis have this feature 
enabled. See:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish


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Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

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