If your wiki is being flooded by WikiSpam, we would like you to follow our AntiSpamRecommendations, but if you do not have the time or the inclination, or you do not have the technical skills / know-how, you should at least follow one of the following approaches.
Do not just leave your wiki running full of spam, by doing this, you are providing a host for spam links, which makes your wiki part of the problem.
Lazy solutions to the wiki spam problem
Shut down your wiki
Obviously this is an extreme solution. But just to re-iterate, this is better than leaving your wiki running full of spam. If your wiki no longer contains any useful content, and nobody cares… shut it down!
Promote user clean-up
Clean up your wiki by reverting the spam edits, and ask your other users to do the same. See also
AntiSpamUserSolution. If you have enough active users, they should be able to help you clear away all the existing spam, and keep the wiki spam free. That is a big 'if' though. Often a wiki becomes
GhostTown, with no community to help with such things. If this is the case with your wiki, read on.
Block all editing
Set all pages on your wiki to locked. Remove the 'edit page' links, and just turn it into a normal read-only website. Do this
after you have found and removed all wiki spam! This is much better than just shutting down the wiki, since the information which your contributors have created will at least remain available. It does require a bit more effort (and hosting cost) than just shutting down the site.
Lock-down with passwords
Disallow editing by anonymous users. Force users to create an account with a username, and sign-in every time prior to editing. More extreme (better spam protection) is to create a GatedCommunity
? in which new users (and spammers) cannot create a new account. They have to request one from you.
People often naively suggest lock-down as best solution to wiki spam. But it runs contrary to the wiki philosophies of being freely and openly editable. It is not a solution we recommend, but it is a good 'lazy solution'; better than all of the above, and
much better than leaving your wiki running full of spam!
…None of these solutions are ideal. In fact they are far from it. But they are all better than providing a host for wiki spam links. Please see our AntiSpamRecommendations if you are interested in ways of keeping your wiki running openly editable, while at the same time fending off wiki spammers.