Wikidot Community

Today I had to disable comments on my personal blog. This was not a sudden thing but progressed over time. Originally I let anyone post comments, not that I had tons of visitors or anything, but relative comments help alot with SEO in keeping the page "fresh" in the eyes of Google. Eventually, and reluctantly I had to remove this ability for all but those registered at Wikidot because the spam was too much.

Now, the spam is nearly as bad as before, it's mainly assholes in China that don't know how to market anything and think that spamming my sites every effing week will earn them millions. No this is not about Race, but it is funny that 99% of all the spam are from China sites. They don't leave legit comments about my articles or anything like that, instead they paste in a commercial advertisement for their crap products. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. They actually go out of their way to create a new wikidot account once or twice a week just to paste more spam on my sites and others I'm sure. I'm fine with people dropping a link in my comments section, provided they leave a legit comment and I prefer for the link to be related in someone to the content of the page.

It would not be so bad if I actually had a way to combat the spam but nothing here seems to work because at least once a week I still have to go and delete spam comments. How can we fix this?

In the meantime Wayne, you could restrict commenting to site members only. Restrict new membership to those that know the password, and then you've effectively got a white-list system where you must pre-approve the member before they post.

For example, I'm sure you know me enough to believe that I wouldn't post spam on your blog :) And yet I can't post either because - due to spammers - you've had to disable comments completely. A white-list system would be a possible solution for this.

I more or less disabled wiihd/fortunz comments for the same reason. Thinking about going all the way and getting rid of comments altogether. Once it got traction on google, the spambots came in floods. For some reason it was mostly about fake school papers. Gamer stereotyping I guess.

I too don't have an issue with the old school blog ethic, where bloggers promoted their own stuff while actually contributing to other blogs. It was a nice community vibe. But flat out spam is very tiring.

Ed's solution is mostly for non-admins, no? Or do those spam-killers have some global blocking power such that even admins would want to report the spam to them and prevent it from going on other wikidot sites? Either way, I'd feel guilty adding to their workload. Even if you block an IP, they'll just get a new one. I'd rather have something more automated. I'd love to allow anonymous posts, but grab any with links in them and put them in a hidden moderation queue, so if I don't attend to it each day, it doesn't bother my readers or aid the spammer's pagerank. Might make more sense for me to just figure out one of those external comment services and use it. I doubt wikidot wants to focus on upgrades of that sort.

Yeah removal of comments has been a progression. Originally it was totally open, then restricted to members. Now people create spam accounts just to spam on Wikidot, not only wikidot sites but commenting on other sites too. One thing I've done on my PBBG site is to have comments* appear only when a checkbox is selected when submitting a new game. This allows me to use data forms to make it easier on submitters but also allows me to remove comments on that page should it get targeted by spammers. (Of course a savvy spammer will realize he can still comment if he is familiar with wikidot).

My other thoughts were to use the css text-replace to replace common spam links left in the community. However the post would still be there until deleted. I would like to think that the spammers would take notice though and eventually just go away.

I would love to have more control over IP's. It would be nice if we could see the full IP of anyone that creates, posts, or edits. Perhaps make this a premium service? That will make it much easier to ban by IP, static or not.

On that note, I feel that I should be able to go my ACP, and have a list of members banned from my site whether or not they are a member. I say this because at first when someone spammed me using a wikidot account, I would go to my ACP and try to add them to my ban list but would be met with the message "this user is not a member of your site". I should be able to ban any abusive user whether he is a member of my site or not, esp since not all sites require membership and I think wikidot users like me try to keep the process as simple as possible and anyone familiar with conversion will understand that the deeper your conversion funnel is the less conversions you will get.

• Code for this:

[[module CSS]]
.yes1 {display:inline;}
.yes0 {display:none;}
.no1 {display:none;}
.no0 {display:inline;}
[[/module]]

Wikidot markup:

[[span class="yes%%form_data{comments}%%"]]
[[include comments]]
[[/span]][[span class="no%%form_data{comments}%%"]][[/span]]

cleanup of comment spam would be easier if the Recent Changes list (or similar) had a method for selecting and deleting groups of comments at once. It would be just a bandaid and not a real solution but would allow me to keep anonymous comments open a little longer.