On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 10:07 AM, halz <[email protected]> wrote: > If you've ever set up a fresh MediaWiki and tried to leave it open to > editing, you'll know about the problem of wiki spam. There's various well > documented tricks to tackle the problem on your own wiki (although it seems > to me that some of these are becoming less effective over time. Particularly > reCaptcha) > > > But wiki spammers are behaving in a staggeringly inconsiderate and > anti-social way, and I've often thought we should explore stronger ways of > delivering some fight back. > > Looking at spam across many wikis e.g. by googling "mediawiki ugg boots" we > could do more internet-wide spam cleanup somehow. > > But recently I came across something, actually by looking at one the spam > links. Take a look at this: sickseo.co.uk/off-page-seo.html This video > shows the use of a tool called 'SENuke Xcr' and another one called 'Ultimate > Demon' to perform "Off site SEO" ...that's "spamming" to you and me. > > I've always known spammers used tools like this, but seeing this > instructional video gives me new insights into what we're up against. Also > see the discussion taking place on forum.edwinsoft.com I find it amazing how > oblivious these people seem to be, to how annoying their activities are for > people running websites. Never do they mention the word spam, or have an > inkling that they may be doing something ethically questionable. > > Do you think we should try to contact them and explain that they are behaving > badly? Maybe on these forums. Maybe we'd have to spam them back repeatedly > with such messages as they get removed by the admins. And on youtube do you > think we can get videos like this removed? We can at least comment on them > and vote them down (Youtube finds quite a lot of similar videos) How about > unleashing a bit of "ethical hacking" e.g. DDOS attacks on people > distributing this software? Really I'm amazed at how they're getting away > with this spamming out in the open these days.
Please do make sure you know the laws of where you live, and stay within them. They may be a pain, but please don't break the law :) Personally, I would recommend taking a look at how some of these tools work and find ways to explicitly detect and block them. At one point we were able to trip up a few of them, but I don't personally have the time right now to reverse engineer them and look for signatures. But if someone wants to do it, I'd gladly point you in the right direction. > Halz > http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Halz > > > _______________________________________________ > MediaWiki-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
