User talk:WikiMaster

I don't know where this text goes, so it's going here...

Lists of things to consider:

• Anti-spam Features -- discusses things that could be done (an upgrade would be a good start). eg.:
  • SpamBlacklist extension
  • NoIndexHistory
• AntiSpamRecommendations
• OpenWiki:NoSpamMessage
• A Spambot template has been created for user pages. These users need sorting out: spambots

Real suggestions, that don't involve just going and getting the latest kit:

• All external linking could be disabled (apparently with "$wgUrlProtocols = '$^';"), and offsite links could be limited to what can be expressed as an InterWiki link. This is extremely limiting, and requires that somebody be available to add InterWiki sites as necessary, but it doesn't involve an upgrade. It would also break many existing pages, so these would need to be found and fixed. Many links could already be turned to InterWiki syntax. --Gumboot

Andrel 19:13, 6 Nov 2005 (PST): But external linking is an important part of what this wiki is about. I've put work into VorbisStreams precisely because it was easy to link to those sites. Anything which requires regular admin intervention is a nonstarter.

• Google seems to index previous versions of pages, which means that reverts are only partially useful. I think the NoIndexHistory point above should be applied to fix that. --Gumboot
  • Can we use norefer only on previous versions (history) of pages? It doesn't hurt and it means the links are no longer useful to the spammers once they're off from the latest version? -- jmspeex

• Mark offsite links as rel="nofollow". That appears to not be the default, here. --Gumboot

• If nothing else at all happens, or to cover the short term while somebody gets around to doing something useful, just exclude Google from everything using robots.txt. --Gumboot
  • Andrel 19:13, 6 Nov 2005 (PST): Wikis lose a tremendous amount of their value if they aren't indexed by the major search services. The whole point of things like VorbisHardware or VorbisStreams is that users doing a search can find them. Plus the spammers won't know the wiki is no longer being indexed, so it won't stop them.
    • Google won't drop its data for ages. In the short term it stops them picking up more, though. The more spam this site hosts the more appealing it looks to other spammers because searching for spam is a good way to find places that will host spam. --Gumboot 12:12, 7 Nov 2005 (PST)