by Squark
on 16 Sep 2011 07:27
As you may have already read in one of our recent blog posts over the last few months we've been fighting the increased SEO-related spam activity on Wikidot. Though at first glance this war seemed like tilting at windmills, we've designed spam-prevention mechanisms that are surprisingly efficient, especially when dealing with automatically created sites. Even if spammers are able to create such sites, we delete them. We hope that spammers eventually will get bored of this uphill struggle.
Automated content creation tools and spam is a huge problem for us. As previously explained, low-quality content may harm the project because it appears to be less worthful and reliable for users, advertisers, investors etc. Who'd want to have its project hosted and managed by a service used vastly by spammers?
But we also need to protect our users' interests and fight spam on all levels. Many of you complained about the spammers flooding their comments and forums. From time to time we have also experienced such spam here, on our blog. In every single case the spammy comment contained a link to an external site.
Until a few days ago, we had been deleting such comments manually, being notified about them by e-mail. But what works for us might not always work for you. Spammers especially abuse blogs and forums with open permissions and count on the fact that admins will not notice and delete their posts. If a site is abandoned, they often succeed. So you either need to monitor your site closely, or make permissions stricter.
How did we solve it? Every site admin may now prevent anonymous (guest) users and users with low karma from including links in their posts. You can find these settings in your Site Manager » Abuse » Options
We have observed that on many forums, new users have to earn some kind of experience or trust until they get full forum functionality. Now you can set the minimal karma level below which users are not possible to post links on forum and page comments.
This should effectively stop abusive comments, decrease the time you need to spend on maintaining your sites, but should not have affect on your regular users.
The options is enabled by default for all sites. If you want to enable your guest users or low-karma users to post links you need to change the option.
We hope that these settings will may Wikidot more reliable and will decrease comments spam prominently.
This is a great tactic to fight spam.
Are signatures with URLs also removed?
~ Kenneth Tsang — jxeeno.com — my new blog | @jxeeno Twitter | My Site
Wikidot Community via IRC (#wikidot on irc.freenode.net)
This is sure to help on a lot of sites using Wikidot and getting spammed. :D
My AdventureQuest Worlds Character
I have noticed a big decrease in spam since this was implemented. I think the biggest impact has been on automated spamming software that is probably now getting the "no links allowed" error message and the post simply can't be saved.
Wikidot API - PHP · A PHP client and code samples for the Wikidot API
Great Work!
Excellent job!
I would also like to suggest to Wikidot to apply this to www.projects.wikidot.com site. I have just received an e-mail notice of two new posts in two different threads, and it resulted to be SPAM for some wedding gowns or something…
BTW, I think that the spammer has a link in his signature. Maybe this feature should be applied on a global Wikidot level, not allowing any link in signatures. Many spammers do not post any links, but they have them in their signatures…
Vir bonus miser vocari, at esse non potest miser.
@Brunhilda: it has been applied to projects.wikidot.com… just a thought… are signatures included in the exclusion?
~ Kenneth Tsang — jxeeno.com — my new blog | @jxeeno Twitter | My Site
Wikidot Community via IRC (#wikidot on irc.freenode.net)
Sorry, tsangk… I have just added a line about the signatures… Yes, he has a link in his signature. Here're the two posts:
http://projects.wikidot.com/thread:57/comments/show#post-1263477
If you see the Recent Changes, you'll see all the threads he posted in…
Vir bonus miser vocari, at esse non potest miser.
Yes, I realise that the spam is there and I also have the permission to delete them. However, without the tools of our spam-killing team - deleting comments are really painful.
My original question was asking if signatures links are also blocked with this feature - obviously not.
~ Kenneth Tsang — jxeeno.com — my new blog | @jxeeno Twitter | My Site
Wikidot Community via IRC (#wikidot on irc.freenode.net)
We're going to add this to the link filtering for anonymous.
Łukasz Tarka
Project Manager
e-mail: moc.todikiw|zsakul#moc.todikiw|zsakul
Need help? Send e-mail at moc.todikiw|troppus#moc.todikiw|troppus
@Squark: anonymous users won't have signatures… are you referring to the feature in general?
~ Kenneth Tsang — jxeeno.com — my new blog | @jxeeno Twitter | My Site
Wikidot Community via IRC (#wikidot on irc.freenode.net)
It is better to add this for fresh users. My suggestion is to use karma level for this, as in posts.
Vir bonus miser vocari, at esse non potest miser.
I always shudder when the Wikidot team refer to Wikidot as a "project". In project-management-speak a project has a defined beginning and end. I know the beginning was in 2006 but I would hate to think there might be an end date!
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
Strathview - Wikidot-based intranet, knowledebase and website development and management
Nice work. Spam has fallen to zero since this change was made. It's such a simple idea and yet so effective! Kudos to the Wikidot team for making this new feature, it's enormously helpful to those of us who have lots of sites on Wikidot.
Portfolio
Well done! Such a simple idea that's so effective!