Wikidot Community

Gentlemen, we live in brutal times.

As of late, Wikidot.Com has been under ever-more intensive attack by spammers, who add links to innocent wikis leading to sites attempting to sell you PhD theses, used cars, pool supplies, and even more dubious offers. This has led many site admins to desperate measures such as locking parts of their wiki or even restricting them to members only, harming the spirit of openness that is the very foundation of the wiki community.

Clearly, we need to fight back. But merely reporting them to the Wikidot.com admins is not enough - we need to expose the spammers for all to see so that everyone recognizes their deviant ways and prepare accordingly. Therefore, I give you:

The Spambot Death Wall

The basics are simple. If you detect a spammer, first flag him as abusive on his user profile. Then add him to the Spambot Death Wall in the same format as the other entries, warning all others of his debased nature. And apart from those adding unwished links to the wikis of others, there are also dark wikis lurking within Wikidot.Com which are dedicated only to spam. If you brave the depths of Wikidot.Com to find those, add them to the second list on the page.

Once the Wikidot.Com admins have reacted and removed the offending presence from our sight, you may strike the name of the spammer through. That user will be part of your kill list, and once sufficient kills have accumulated, I will write up statistics for the people with the highest kill scores. There might or might not be prices, but there will be public recognition by your peers.

Frivolity aside, the Spambot Death Wall will also serve another purpose - it will allow everyone to examine just how spammers operate on this site, which will hopefully lead to a more effective effort in fighting them. So far, only the Wikidot.Com site maintainers have an overview on which users get flagged as abusive, and they are stuck with a thousand other scores. By making spammers publicly known, others can get into the act and come up with suggestions for fighting them.

I'd also like to mention that I originally came up with this concept from my experiences on LiveJournal, where I also had problems with Spambots. I created a Spambot Death Wall there as well - and soon the spambot attacks dwindled to nothing. Let's hope that this works here as well - that it sends a message to the spammers that the contributors to the Death Wall will not be intimidated and will fight back.

Thanks to the quick actions of the Wikidot.Com admins, it was possible to establish the the Spam Wiki Kill Score Table.

I have also created a Spam Analysis article which will help others in hunting down spammers (and protecting their wikis from them). I feel that we haven't nearly reached the bottom of all this yet - in particular there seem to be numerous spam wikis hidden in the depths of Wikidot.Com…

Happy Hunting!

I think that the link to this site should be in a dropdown menu here at Community site. As a matter of fact, I will put it right now. Hope there will be no objections…

rhombus p is trying to improve on the design of the wiki - he's been working on a possible new frontend here.

Unfortunately, I'll likely be too busy to do any work on the wiki for the next 10 days or so, but if you have any suggestions for a new design which improves the process, please give him feedback!

Thanks for the great site. I'll take a look at the sites and users and remove if it's necessary.