Its been a while since the s23.org wiki decided to try one of those Allowed Spam pages in hopes that spammers would only spam that page and leave the rest alone. It looks like some spammers may listen, but definitely not nearly all. Most spammers don't read the pages they spam so its pretty useless to provide a spam allowed page. It just helps the spammers ranking and does little to help the wiki. – Joe
Thanks for this wiki and for your good Zauber! This initiative is great. I'd whish to build and coordinate the SpamBusters? here. on CaFoscari? I exceeded the SpamHereOnly idea. follow the CaFoscari:SandBox. I submitted a spammer "manga" here who bothered on s23 wiki. I do not quite understand the concept yet. You explain pretty good on your pages, but it's just all a little complicated and I lack the knowledge on essential things. I might start to translate pages here to German. Ater submitting the spammer it gives me html code to add to a page. Couldn't this page be an "antimateria" spam page on a wiki? A page where all nasty spam get's exposed as a fightback mis(mis)using the keywords of the spam. I had an easy spammer on CaFoscari?, who - instead of spamming on Sandbox - created a page SpamHere (now renamed to SpamHereOnly) and spammed his spam on decor-posters there. This is an fair behaviour and I have no objection to leaving such spam on the SpamHereOnly page, the only page where spam is tolerated on a wiki. For a little while, not forever, sure. Someone tries to sell deco-posters, ok. I would not feel so on a link to a child-pornography page. This spammer - as long as no case of bad behaviour gets known and reported - could be tolerated. Bad spammers instead should be actively fought. I'd love to create PageToHarmEvilSpammers? and put their spam linking to chonqed.org on it. It must be crystall-clear to spammers, that they either change their behaviour or there will be ongoing pain and trouble for them from engaged wikiusers. Maybe SpamBusters? is not a good name for such wikiusers? I thought about the mediocrely funny movie "Ghost-Busters" whishing to give this sad and serious issue a light name. But German is my mothertongue not Englisch. Better proposals?
This get's pretty complicated, I agree.
Two things must be done:
How does a spammer behave?
This must be documented, evaluated and it must be decided on how to treat a spammer. Three categories for now.
Spam is not Spam
Therefore it must be evaluated. This needs poll tools. These are just being developed. Crao: Wiki sondage plug-in Three categories for now.
In my personal evaluation a child porn spammer persistently not caring about where spamming on wiki is C3-class. The Deco-poster spammer on CaFoscari:SpamHereOnly Spam here only] is an A2-class spam and should be deleted after a while from the page. The interesting thing now is A1-class-spam. It is no spam. It is a link to something you would like to support. And more: You drop into something you think is a good thing and you feel that others on your wiki would thinks so too. You'd like it to have a better google ranking, but it is off topic for the wiki you use. You put it on SpamHereOnly. Note that this will not disturb the major recent changes, as all edits on SpamHereOnlyPages? are automatically minor edits (has to be implemented). You feel, I suppose, that this is not only removing some spam from wiki but laying the ground for a fair, selfcontrolled and self-responsible world-society. Thanks for reading. Cu – MattisManzel
Hi Mattis and welcome on the chongqed.org wiki! I just activated <br> and I hope I didn't break anything in the process.
Cool, removed my request for activation. This is the "wiki-like" working speed I apprechiate. MattisManzel
I drafted a classification poll on contribution/person on phpWiki: Poll: person/contribution
Spam IS Spam on chongqed.org
I think we have to differentiate two different points of view here: the view from a single wiki perspective and the more global perspective that chongqed.org takes.
It may be hard on a single wiki to tell what is spam and what is not spam (although I believe that anything that isn't wanted is spam, your poll seems to be a very good tool to find that out). But the spammers listed on chongqed.org have spammed more than just one wiki. All of those spammers posted the same kind of crap to multiple wikis (or guestbooks or blogs), none of them were regular contributors to any of those places, and each time it was obvious what they wanted: they wanted google's attention, they didn't want clicks from human beings.
Some of those spammers replaced the contents of complete wiki pages with their spam. You don't need a poll for these guys: they must be chongqed immediately.
We have gotten a few submissions that didn't make it into the database. These were indeed singular cases of wiki spam.
chongqed.org is for the notorious, evil, anti-social, anti-wiki spammers that everyone hates.
By the way: if you still have questions about chongqed.org and how it works (or is supposed to work), why not ask them on QuestionsAboutChongqing ?– Manni
Pages like these already exist:
SpamAntiMateria? may. Better ideas?
All begin:
This looks like spam here but it isn't. It's SpamAntiMateria? causing trouble to spammers who cause trouble to wiki. So don't delete it. In the editmode you can see that all links here link to Chongqed.org where the wikilandia-wide resistance against WikiSpam is coordinated.
Synchronizing all WikiAntiMateria? pages will make spammers feel this little thingy. SpamHereOnly and this SpamAntiMateria? page should have uniform names all over wikilandia. Else you can forget about making this work all over. The CamelCase? name is important. It mustn't be misleading because we didn't think this far enough. To be precise, that is to be less precise in this case, as there might be other stuff than spam on this page, all kind of stuff to be put on this page outsides of the working area of wiki: SpamHereOnly shoul be kind of an OffTopicResort?. It is the "Outsides of the gravitation of a Community". This WikiTrabant? of stuff, tolerable garbage with diamonds mixed in by ourselves is a tool a community has to take influence on the google-ranking world. I like that.
Synchronising solicited links on this page between wikis or groups of wikis could be of interest as well. – MattisManzel
My opinion on the Classes of Spam, there is only one class and that is unwanted spam. If a link is off topic on a wiki it better be from someone who is a regular user of that wiki and even then it should be for the benifit of the entire wiki comunity, not the PageRank of the poster's site. If its from a totally new user who has no interest in participating in the wiki other than to post their links that is spam.
Some wikis are really loose on what is off topic, but still there is a line between spam and off topic. A "check out my cool new page" from a regular user that points to their business is off topic, but its probably not meant to increase their PageRank. The same "check out my cool new page" link that points to casino-online and is repeatedly posted to a lot of wikis is not only off topic, but unwanted spam. If a link is removed then a normal user may put it back once or twice before starting an arguement about it being deleted. A spammer just keeps replacing it over and over until they move on to the next wiki.
By having a SpamHereOnly page it only encourages spammers to continue. It doesn't matter that they link to harmless things or child porn, its still not right and should not be tolerated. Its only going to stop the wiki spammers with a concience (and we know most don't have one) that actually read the wiki. Most spammers don't ever read a wiki before they spam it, they just find the wiki address in Google and enter it into their automated spamming program. At the POPFile wiki any unauthorized URL is automatically blocked from display (and Google) with a large red message. We still have spammers hit the pages over and over and over again until they are blocked.
I also doubt that its possible to standardize on WikiNames? for antispam pages on wikis. WikiSpam has become a pretty widely used standard for discussing spam, but its not universal and it happened organically. It wouldn't have happened if it was forced. – Joe
Joe, you write on the page: There is a general tendency to name this page xxx instead of yyy, this has zzz adavantages for a common work in wikilandia. When renaming xxx to yyy I help fixing the links. Wouldn't it be possible? I mean, wikizens are not silly, they know about the power of collaboration. Some places you might be ignored, yes, sure, but in general not, I guess.
About the C3 class spam you are fighting here. No objections. 98% of what it's all about on Chonqued is obvious C3-class-spam everybody can tell it's spam even with their monitor is switched off - so obvious it is. But the remaining 2% are more or less doubtful and there might be even a good link slipping in by any stupid accident saometimes. There has to be a mechanismn to report such a case and to get it removed from a banning or "punishing" list. I tried to establish a commode way on reporting on accidentialy banned contents on CW for everybody. You can't write on baned contens in CW without admin rights. I asked for a page everybody can write on linked to on the top of the write protected banned contents page. It's mostly pretty easy to supply clean democratic conditions and it's mainly not too much of mor work. I'm most hopefull that this will be done here as despite you guys are obviously loaded, which is understandable for me, your work til now is very clear and fair and well explained. Lemme just symbolically take one unit of emotionality, one atomos of it, from the understandable anger of you on the foto the spammer manipulated and published, that just a drop in an ocean - one drop - and carry it over into our clean desire for global fairness. What fuckes me up mre than a nasty spammer is a person who doesn't care about the fact that for blocking one spammer and making life easier the whole mainland china gets blocked, even if the likelihood that there will be useful contributions from the mainland china is about zero. It simply is not zero. Thinking on this in terms of Zauber this is equal to spam. an antisocial, rude behaviour and it should be treated as such. The internet is not in English, it is multilingual. Any kind of non-integrativity, any kind of local fashismn, be it spammers ignoring people or someone ignoring the mainland of china for personal advantages is what Chongqed is about not to fight ("Mein Kampf") but to help reintegrate into the whole. Wiki is about the whole. It is a chance we have to understand that it exists. 'There is no competition anymore since Miles Davis "Bitches Brew". There is wiki.' I wrote somewhere on CW a while ago. May be it helps forgiving me for the hippie-shit I write here. I'm good at that, know? Thanks for reading. – MattisManzel
Well, I see what you were talking about C3 now then. But naming all of the lower levels spam is using spam really broadly. By many people's definition it probably qualifies, but there is a big difference between a real C3 spammer and a Troll. Both are unwanted, but a Troll would not need to be chongqed. But I don't really see a the need of catagories in between. – Joe
I'm trying a bit different on Ca' Foscari wiki:Off topic – MattisManzel
An OffTopic? page is a good page to provide users of the wiki with a place to put off topic links and discussion, but since you are also allowing normal spam the page is unlikely ever to be used for simple off topic links. Would you want to put your off topic link on a page full of spam? It makes your link look like spam and you look like a spammer by association.
There are three things that potentially would go on the OffTopic? page: legitimate users' off topic stuff, trolls, and spammers. I have already pointed out why legitimate users are unlikely to use it. Trolls are jerks and are not going to limit their stupidity to a single page, that defeats the purpose of being a troll, to piss people off and get attention. So that leaves only spammers, which makes this equivalent to a SpamHereOnly page.
I can't decided which is a worse idea, the OffTopic? page or the SpamHereOnly page. The SpamHereOnly page is obvious to spammers that they can post links there and only there just from the page name. It is also already beginning to become a sort of standard name for pages like this. The OffTopic? page the way you are using it has exactly the same use as a SpamHereOnly page without the benifit of a known name that tells spammers that is the only place they can spam.
I can see why people hope that SpamHereOnly pages will help, once spammers realize they are better off posting to a SpamHereOnly page because their links will be left alone (for a while) they will quit spamming other pages wikis.
Look at it like this, if a wiki was your house (which you want to leave unlocked so friends can come in whenever they want) and someone came in and vandalized it you would be upset and want to stop them. You wouldn't provide them a room and say you can vandalize this room all you want, just leave the others alone. You might if you are setting up a trap to arrest them, but you would only get a few that way before others knew what you were doing. The same applies to SpamHereOnly pages. If you chongq them then what is their insentive to post on a SpamHereOnly page. But if you don't chongq them why would they ever stop spamming?
And finally, if you have a spammer that has enough morals to limit spam to a SpamHereOnly page you could probably also convince them to leave you wiki alone by saying spam is not allowed. Several of the spammers we have been contacted by have said something like they didn't realize people would be upset about their spam or that they didn't know spam wasn't allowed. Spammers are pretty dumb, just look at Lior and his extremely stupid rip-off of chongqed.org. – Joe
Your argumentation is quite rigt. I'd like to provide space to all three of the possible types of contributors. OffTopic?/SpamHereOnly + all subpages of this pge are for spam only. The others do whatever they want on Offtopic + Subpages. Better? – MattisManzel
Much better, but I don't think trolls are ever going to cooperate so I wouldn't worry about providing them a seperate page other than hoping they will stick to the OffTopic? page. I still dislike the hole idea of giving in to spammer at all by allowing them to spam any page. Now if you also added a robots.txt with NOFOLLOW for your SpamHereOnly page that would mean they can post all they want and Google will never follow those links (and hopefully not increase their PageRank). Most spammers wouldn't look at the site's robots.txt to see if their spamming would do them any good. – Joe
Not sure yet, but I think fairness, even with spammers is the only way. Ca' Foscari wiki: recent changes – MattisManzel
Fairness with spammers? With people taking advantage of wikis only for their own benifit? Allowing spammers in any way is only encouraging spamming. The United States CAUSE Act to "regulate" some spam email did the same thing. They did little to retrict them and in doing so validated that spamming is legal. Since then spam from the US has increased a lot according to some studies.
If your not going to leave up child porn links on the SpamHereOnly page why leave up other spam? What about other porn, hardcore, softcore, fetish, …? What about phishing, scam, and fraud websites? How about sites with illegal downloads (cracked software, DeCSS?, etc.) or sites with links to illegal downloads, they aren't the same? How about downloads who's whole purpose is to infect a computer with spyware/adware, keylogger, viruses, or trojans? If your site is in Germany how do you handle spam selling Hitler's "Mein Kampf" which is illegal to distribute in Germany? What about sites you disagree with? Where is the line? Who sets it? And how do you enforce it? And who is going to go to each spam site and check? – Joe
I write here only for my own benefit and you do for yours as well. It kicks us personally, all we care for is this kick. Our kicks might be built into another ethic view on the world than spammer have it, but heck! We're not better or worse than them. We probably have had the advantage to be able to understand this better - but we still act according to what kicks us. The circumstances under which we act - pretty mostly the financial circumstances, I guess - are different to those of spammers. That's what makes them the bad guys and us the good, basically. Not sure though. What happens to google, the internet and the free market if this works out, that is the more interestung question. Maybe a new-world's-google will rank things on how free and how open things are? Would be fine for me. This would kick me a lot. That's why I go for it. Hot stuff, indeed. – MattisManzel
I layed out a concept for enabeling wikis capability to be all-inclusive by making it all-inclusive itself. See Ca'Foscari-wiki: off topic. Part of that "garage" is Ca'Foscari-wiki: chongqed Please copy over some chonqued spammers there. Make sure there is nobody accidentialy chonqued among them. – Mattis Manzel
I understand that you dislike it. See it like this. This gives wiki-communities a little tool to politically influence google and the free world market. By deciding what spam we leave on spam here only and what spam we remove when, we have an instrument to disturb the world-google-machinery. That's what the classification scheme was thought for. With enough free off-topic space everybody - and not any longer only the ones with serverspace and the money to buy it - has a chance. Spam classification and related chongqing and removal from the spam here only pages instead of general robot.txt. People have the power. Spammers though have to take the bite first. We will have to leave the filth a bit in the beginning. It will later turn into a different thing, positive, I feel, the more positive the more we care for it. Zauber. Dunno yet.– Mattis Manzel
I am sure by now Google has taken notice of these wiki spammers, but its got to be hard to figure out how to deal with them. They did improve Blogger's antispam features and have pretty much stopped spam on Blogger. Their changes were publicized well enough that spammers realized there was no point anymore.
But wikis are not under their control. So they must find some way to detect spammed links. How do you punish spammers and not hurt legitimate site's PageRanks? too much? And it must be done without using tons of extra processing of webpages so index updates are kept frequent and current. They can't use a blacklist because they say they don't mess with specific pages ranking.
Much of the spam is repeated daily so its pretty obvious, but the Googlebot only visits even popular sites every few days or weeks. You have to be a major news site like CNN to get indexed daily. Most small or inactive sites are updated less than monthly. So its impossible for Google to go by how often a spam is posted.
The only solution I can think of is to punish sites that have a sudden massive increase in links over a short period of time. But that is only a short term punishment. Once those spams have been there for a while and start getting removed and replaced on the same sites the growth in number of links will slow. And this relies on the freshness of the index and a lot of the spam is taking place on small inactive sites that are not going to be reindexed frequently. – Joe