Fighting back against wiki and blog spam

All your page ranks are belong to us!

What can I do to prevent wiki spam?

There are several things you can do to prevent spam on your wiki. They differ in the amount of work and fun involved, and, of course, the differ in effectiveness. However, since wikis are community endeavors, fighting wiki spam can also be done by a community with different people doing different things.

Here is a list of things you can do. The order of this list is quite arbitrary. Pick your fancy.

• Use the "Recent Changes" feature of your wiki software and monitor changes. This let's you quickly find and delete spam.
• Don't let search engines index your "Page History" or "Recent Revisions" pages.
  • Deleting all the spam isn't very helpful when search engines still find the spam when they index your past versions. You could adjust your robots.txt file or (much simpler) you could let your wiki software emit "noindex nofollow" for the robots META tag. Here's a decription. Don't exclude your complete wiki, but the history/revisions pages should be off-limits. Here is some code to implement this concept for the Open Wiki: The No Spam Message page at the Open Wiki.
  • Another important reason to hide your kept pages from search engine robots is that spammers use search engines to find spammable wikis. And they do this by entering spammy URLs as the search term. The idea is simple and effective: if there is a page out there that contains spam, then it could contain even more spam, so I better find it. You can read more about this here.
• Use a blacklist to ban spammy content from your wiki. One such blacklist contains the spam domains in the chongqed.org database. You can find it at blacklist.chongqed.org.
• Write abuse complaints. Write to the providers and hosters of the spammers. Use whois on the spammer IP to find out his ISP and his web hoster. Then write a friendly letter to them describing what the spammer did to your wiki. Be friendly! An abusive abuse complaint is not going to help. Also make sure that you really write to the provider or hoster, and not to the spammer.
• Link to chongqed.org using the spammer's favorite keywords thus that others will know that he spammed you and they should not do business with him. See "What you could do" on about chongqed.org for an example. Please read our guidelines before doing that, though. You could use one of our banners for you links.