From: "David G. Andersen" <dga@...>
Date: 2004-07-06T06:32:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Wiki spam

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 01:43:34AM +0900, Aredridel scribed:
> On Mon, 2004-07-05 at 18:31 +0900, Gavin Sinclair wrote:
> > Folks,
> > 
> > As many people will know, the RubyGarden wiki
> > (http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby) has been under constant spam attacks for
> > a while now.  Does anyone have any idea how to prevent these attacks?
> 
> Yes. Alter the engine so that external URLs go to a non-indexed-by-
> search-engines "leaving the site" page. It effectively kills any
> pagerank that adding a link would add to the linkee. That's both good
> and bad, but it's a short-term solution.
> 
> It may be that a simple HTTP redirect script would work, too, but I'm
> not sure.

  This removes the long term incentive, but the spammers can't
be counted on to realize that their spam isn't effective... just
as they don't care about filling my mailbox, even though I'll never
click.

  The capcha solution seems like the most preferable way to go
about it.  Just make sure it has an alternative non-visual captcha
for the visually impaired.

  -Dave

-- 
work: dga@lcs.mit.edu                          me:  dga@pobox.com
      MIT Laboratory for Computer Science           http://www.angio.net/