chongq (verb): to retaliate against spammers of wikis and blogs.
Chonqging, China is the city where the spammer that inspired us to start this campaign works/lives. We quickly discovered this spammer likes to spam lots of wikis, blogs, and guestbooks with his links and the keywords chongqing and emmss. Once we realized this guy was a big time web spammer we decided the best solution (in addition to blocking him) was to sabotage his Google PageRank for his favorite keywords. When Manni and Joe started off, the immediate goal was to knock that spammer's pages off the front page of search results for the keywords he spams, but we are not limiting ourselves to this one spammer.
And sorry if you actually live in Chongqing. Because it is a real place name we use lowercase "chongqing" when refering our antispam movement.
We need your support to help us be successful in our chongqing campaign. Just like the spammers, we need links from other pages to increase our Google PageRank so we can be above the spammer in search results and let people know about them before they get suckered into visiting the spammer's page. Unlike the spammers, we aren't going to spam wikis to improve our ranking. Thanks to all of you who already have linked to us we do have a pretty good PageRank and are relatively effective against spammers on some keywords.
Most people that don't see wiki spam as a problem don't understand what a wiki really is. Some say any open content on the net is just asking to be spammed. Often wiki owners do find the easiest solution is to stop allowing anonymous posting. But that is not in the spirit of a wiki, they are meant to be open to anonymous users. Being open encourages everyone to add their knowledge of the topic for everyone to benefit from. When posting to a wiki, the information or link should benefit other users, not your PageRank.
Many say add a robots.txt so Google won't index the sandbox page. They don't realize that spammers aren't limiting themselves to sandbox pages. No spammer ever hit the sandbox page at POPFile (maybe since its not named SandBox), they just spammed the main page, the FAQ index, created new spam pages, hit user pages, etc. On other wikis, most of the spam we clean is not on sandbox pages either. We do really strongly agree there are good reasons to use robots.txt or noindex meta tags though. Previous history versions, diffs, deleted pages, about user pages, and sandboxes shouldn't be indexed. But its not a total solution.
A few people even say you should block the entire wiki from Google. But that is counter-productive in 2 ways: When it was tried at worldwidewiki.net (and announced with a big note), it didn't even slow down spammers from messing up the wiki. Many wikis have very useful information and should be in Google for people to find the information. Wikis are a very popular source for documentation for open source projects (either as supplemental or the primary documentation). Mozilla, Gnome, Apache, Gentoo, POPFile, and K-Meleon are just a few examples of OSS that make good use of wikis. By having the documentation in a wiki, it gives non-programmers a way to contribute to the software they use.
The real problem (other than spammers are jerks) is how the change log and revision history pages are stored by many Wikis. They should not be readable by Google. Wiki program authors should add a noindex meta tag on this kind of pages. Wiki spam is becoming too prevalent to let these "backup" pages be indexed in search engines. This only encourage the spammers to vandalize wikis because even after cleaning up their damage, Google will see it in the revision histories for a month (depending on your Wiki software).