[Clipart] Roadmap on wiki

[Bryce Harrington]

On Sat, 4 Sep 2004, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Alberto Simões <hashashin at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > It is very weird... is somebody editing that? Or we need to rollback?
> 
> Reverted.  That was clearly spam.  Webmasters do this to Wiki pages
> that are indexed by search engines to try to increase their PageRank
> score, by having links with certain text point to their page.  There
> are two cheif defense strategies against it:  either we remove the
> incentive by setting the robot behavior to "none" so that search
> engines don't index the publically-editable pages, or someone watches
> the Wiki like a hawk and reverts any such changes immediately.

And we've got a third tool in our disposal - outright banning.  When you
revert spam, put 'despam' or 'death to wiki spammers' or just 'spam spam
eggs, sausage and spam - with spam' in the comment field when you save,
and periodically I'll go through and use those to update the ban list.
That way folks don't have to keep reverting the same wikispam, but can
get new and more interesting wikispam instead.

If we get a particularly persistant fellow, and we need a fix asap,
email me or the list.

There are some other, more powerful tools we can use to control the
site, however they'd impact the freedom or usability of the wiki (such
as requiring login/passwords), so those are probably best left as last
resorts.  

Bryce