Wikidot.com is a little like the Wild West: communities of honest citizens working hard to build something important, and random bandits who come in shooting spam and scam and poisoning the well for the rest of us. Few things annoy us more than some low-life posting junk on a site we've spent months carefully building and looking after.
Spam comments tend to get killed within minutes, or hours, thanks to notifications. But there are spam sites and spam profiles, and these cause Wikidot.com to be blocked by firewalls, blacklisted as a "spam" hosting service and so on. The bandit sites have to go!
Phil Chett, Helmuti, and other senior community admins have been discussing with me for some months on how to solve this problem. We want to make Wikidot.com a 100% spam free zone, and this means firm action to kill the bandit sites that break the Terms of Service and damage Wikidot.com.
There is no point in keeping these discussions secret. I'm going to form a police force, the Sheriffs, who are super-moderators of Wikidot. Phil will be the Senior Sheriff, mainly because he rode out last weekend and shot dead several hundred bandit profiles. Phil will recruit a force of a dozen or so fellow Sheriffs, all senior community admins and supergurus, who will get the power to shoot dead any Wikidot site that they consider to be a bandit site.
It will be simple brutal justice, but with safeguards. The Sheriffs will look at the bodies and if there was an innocent caught by accident, they'll be able to bring it back. Wikidot Inc. will be the ultimate judge, and anyone who feels their innocent site, perhaps wearing bandit makeup for Halloween, was wrongly killed, can ask us to intervene.
The Sheriffs will get badges, so you can recognize them and point them to bandit sites directly. They will choose new Sheriffs by invitation, and they will be independent of Wikidot Inc. so there is no risk of turning a police force into a private security service. You may laugh but censorship happens easily once we start moderating content.
So what do you think about this?
That's a good start, every action should be taken for not being blocked or blacklisted. I'm a freeloader so I don't mind that much but it's as serious matter to those who pay and use Wikidot for their business when customers can't reach their sites.
___TTT___/ http://www.trumpetexercises.net
(_|||_) \ - Janne
I do pay for wikidot and hope to one day use it as a business solution so this is very important (that and stability!). Please give us a list of the sheriffs, maybe on the blackbelt site so we know who to inform of spammy accounts and sites.
DRAW!
Good luck, Phil. Go ged 'em cowboy!
Sue
Spammers beware! Them cowboys are gonna clean up this town!
( I might have lived in theat time period if only they had computers)
Maybe this could be done by enlisting normal, bored users as "Deputies" who scroll through a list of sites and mark them for "Sheriff review." You know, like Mechanical Turk, enlisting the work of the bored masses and all that. The list of sites up for Deputy review could be shortened based on marks in earlier reviews.
If there are hundreds of spam sites, personally contacting and explaining stuff to Sheriffs is quite a bit of work…that's all I'm thinking.
EDIT: And don't Sheriffs wear stars? That'll be confusing.
EDIT2: I noticed that you wrote an entry about graphmastur's blog post. I had just figured that graphmastur was Pieter. Oops.
I really like that idea but I'll leave it to Sheriff Chett to make happen.
As for stars, this also crossed my mind but I figured we could find another symbol.
Portfolio
Which there are.
Step one. Someone spends a bit of time to seek and destroy on a mass basis. Reports when happy.
Step Two Community spies spot the odd straggler, and points.
Step three A sheriff shoots!
Hm.. I wonder about computer algorithms to detect it. Spam sites, that is.
Has a button been put into place to report sites yet?
Yes, we have used these but they are not nearly as good as human detection because they catch innocent sites too.
We rely today on a mix of automated spam assassination and search-and-kill sessions.
Portfolio
A horse?
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
A gun.
Portfolio
A target?
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegan. - Paul McCartney
I was completely oblivious to the problem until this blog posting, but a quick search shows that the deputies have probably got a fair bit of work to do.
http://www.wikidot.com/search:all/a/pf/q/viagra
I'd think about 99% of the above sites the above search locates would be SPAM sites. Is there any way anyone can think of to easily identify the legitimate pages in the list?
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
About time….these spam sites are obvious and it will be good that a few super users are going to have the power to just be "rid of them"
as for the search suggested above, I think that't a great way to spot these sites, also the legitimate ones will be the pro users (although I doubt there will be a single legitimate site selling prescription pharmaceuticals online, or perhaps not sites that wikidotcom would want.
I would also think "sex" and "porn" might be good keywords.
One is. the other isn't :-)
Karate, Wild West, and probably something else I've forgotten. It keeps things interesting :)
This is a great idea — looking forward to seeing it happen!
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
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