From: Jim Weirich <jim@...>
Date: 2005-04-08T22:44:51+09:00
Subject: Re: fed up with this newsgroup

Jim Menard said:
> You know what's really wierd? I can see that page just fine at home, but
> at work there is no content on the page---though I can see the header and
> footer.

Jim, you have probably been caught by the RubyGarden tarpit.

The tarpit is designed to catch spammers by directing them to a mirror of
the wiki that they are allowed to edit as much as they want. 
Occasionally, I update the tarpit from the real wiki and wipe out the
spammer changes.

This approach has been worked surprisingly well in keeping spammers out of
the wiki.  In fact, it has worked so well that we rarely get spammers in
the tarpit anymore ... the big spammers tend to monitor which wikis/blog
comments get picked up by google and focus their attention on the sites
that give them the most google juice.  The tarpit gives them exactly zero
juice, so they tend to leave it alone.

Aside:  I'm actually surprised by this result ... I didn't think they
monitored their results so closely.  But evidently they do.  That's why
its important to clean up spammer comments before they get indexed by
Google.  Leaving the spam there invites more spam.  (see "Broken Window
Theory" in "The Pragmatic Programmer")

Ok, back to the tarpit.  The criteria used to direct spammers to the
tarpit is simple.  If the following two conditions are true, you will see
the tarpit.

(1) You have not set preferences in the wiki.
(2) Your IP address does not support a reverse DNS lookup.

That's it.  Every single spam attempt (that I have seen while monitoring)
came from an address that did not resolve back to a host name.  Very few
legitimate posters fell into that category.

So ... If you think you are in the tarpit ... just click the preferences
link at the top of the page ... create a user name and assign a password. 
The wiki just sets a cookie that remembers you from that point on (you
don't have to login) and it will not send you to the tarpit.

-- 
-- Jim Weirich     jim@weirichhouse.org    http://onestepback.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)