Halz is an I.T. consultant and web spam fighter, from the U.K.
I have decided to remain anonymous because spammers always remain anonymous (or try to) and can turn nasty sometimes. Rest assured I am a real person. If I have emailed/messaged you offering anti-spam advice, or complaining about something you are hosting on your website, I hope you will take this as a genuine message to be heeded/responded to, despite the lack of a real name.
Why Halz supports chongqed.org
I have had a lot of my work defiled by wiki spammers. They are clearly the same breed of evil selfish anti-social lowlife who send email spam. It saddens and angers me, when I see abuse of these technologies. These are technologies which the world is free to benefit from. Built with real vision and selfless desire to help everyone. Designed to be free and easy, so that everyone understands and gets involved. Not just techy people, but everyone; small children and OAPs alike. That such a brilliant thing could be degraded by a selfish minority of porno touting scumbags, really makes my blood boil.
Spam fighting activities
Tackling wiki spam has proved to be quite an interesting and varied endeavor. I would prefer not to have to do it, but as long as there are inconsiderate selfish people out there, there will be spam. We can help to solve the problem, not just by gnashing our teeth or whinging about it, but by banding together and helping each other out. I am particularly interested in…
- Tackling the GhostTown problem. I have attempted to find ghost towns and leave messages for wiki administrators, pointing out the problem of maintaining webservers full of spam (If you have received such a message, please read 'GhostTown' for more information) I have also been cleaning up some ghost towns by hand, which gives an interesting insight into the way spammers operate, and the way search engines work.
- Discussing various technical solutions to the WikiSpam problem. I believe this chongqed.org wiki is already the best resource out there, for information on spam solutions, but I would like to see it becoming a central place for all wiki communities to come together and discuss the solutions. So far it hasn't really attracted many of these discussions, and the seperate wiki engine development communities continue to rehash the same discussions amongst themselves.
- Laying out some AntiSpamRecommendations. The product of discussions should be a distilled list of the best technical solutions, and/or the easiest solutions to implement.
- Encouraging adoption of the recommendations by wiki engines developers.
- Encouraging adoption / use of anti-spam features by wiki owners.
I decided the best way of engaging in these activities, is to get out there and chat to people and leave links back to chongqed.org This also gives OurPageRanks a leg-up, which helps with the original aim of outranking the spammers.
My programming abilities
I have some programming knowledge, so may be able to lend a hand with chongqed.org development, but probably not, since I don't know perl. I've seen perl a few times and I think it looks scarey :-) Done a bit of PHP though (some similarities) I should probably learn perl actually, but recently I've only been doing java, and JSP web development (CSS, javascript DHTML, XSLTs and all the other web tricks)
Actually one of my most valuable skills as an IT professional, is being a finickety bastard when it comes to documentation, which is why I love reorganising wiki pages!
Messages for Halz
I have yahoo.co.uk email, but the best way to contact me is to edit this page, and stick a message at the bottom.(There were lots of messages here, but they were all old, so I've blown them all away)
Hello, as UseMod is mentioned on some pages would it be possible to add an InterMap entry for it? – UseMod:MarkusLude?