This is the sneakiest most subtle spam I've seen so far on kayak wiki. Someone promoting "american-debt-management dot org", went to some trouble to make their spam less conspicous. They set a username 'JD' in their 'Preferences'. Their spam was labelled as a 'minor edit' (which means the edit does not appear on RecentChanges, unless you modify your Preferences). The spam itself was a link to the website as part of a sentence, which made it actually read quite well (how considerate!), tacked on to the end of a paragraph. Then later on today he came back and did something even more sneaky. He changed some existing links so that the text looked exactly the same as before, but pointed to the website. See here – Halz 27th Sept 2004
I have seen them do all of that before, but I don't think I have seen them all done in combination. Logging in seemed relatively uncommon last time I did much chongqing, but it was only a matter of time. It makes their edits look much more legitimate. Changing existing links is one of the worst methods. Its been around since at least the begining of chongqed.org but since it takes more effort I guess not too many are doing it. Its getting harder to notice spam like this unless someone is looking carefully at all revisions (including minor).
In this guy's case Edit Throttling would have at least preventing him from editing so many pages. Just the Books page was edited 16 times in 9 minutes. Its hard to believe a real person would need to edit a page that many times.
The whois info for 83.130.105.147 lists a Lior Barash from Israel. That does not appear to be our old chongqed.com buddy. I guess Lior is a common name. The "Alexander Yanay 1" address seems familiar but I can't seem to remember or find where I have seen it. – Joe
OK, the guy is now chongqed: debt managment. Joe: Where did you find this IP address?
It's funny how I will always find something else to add to the database when looking at one particular spammer. This time, I also added green card reg and online university advisor. – Manni
I thought about adding him, but I didn't know how you wanted to handle not spamming keywords, though his are pretty obvious. I found his URL by looking at the Kayak wiki's spammed pages. The IPs are in alt or title text of the username, so just mouseover JD and you will see it.
Did you recognize the Alexander address? I seem to remember that from the early days of chongqing. Before Lior I think we had another spammer from Israel, but I can't remember what site it was. – Joe
Oh, Duh. I didn't notice the tooltips. They even work on this wiki. Nice feature. No, I didn't recognize the address, but 'zahav.net.il' looks somewhat familiar. – Manni
Mouseover tooltips for IPs work on most wikis I think. Its a bit of a pain since copy and paste requires viewing the page source and you can't type and view a tooltip at the same time. You could use a screen capture utility and run it through an OCR program, but I guess paper and pencil or remembering it would work. I don't think I have ever seen 'zahav.net.il', but knowing how good my memory often is I wouldn't doubt it. – Joe
JD (igld-83_130_105_147.inter.net.il) logged in at Dach's wiki and spammed the Spam page about the same time. He apparently read the page, he added his spam at the end of an existing antispam paragraphs, trying to disguise it first as "Another site that spams is http://www.american-debt-management org/." and then as "Also blogging is http://www.american-debt-management org/. – Joe