Well I can't exactly say that its a bad idea, but the possible effects to other sites are troubling. Their way of making it not a DDoS? does not really convince me its not one. Attacking a spammer's site will slow down whatever network the spammer is on and may affect innocent victims. Then there are the legal problems of this. Can Lycos survive law suits from several spammers? I don't know much about Lycos' current stability, but if they don't have the money to back this up in court for months it wont last long. The top spammers are rich and this interferes with them being richer so they are going to do whatever they can to stop Lycos. The idea is very similar to the SpamVampire? site which is apparently rather popular. But being run from a large company as a screensaver gives it much more power and is a better target to sue. – Joe
Some areas are still unclear. I think the SpamReport page was intended as a kind of holding area for spammers and keywords to be added to the database, perhaps where the 'sumbit spammer' form was not appropriate. …but we've also started chatting about particular spammers here. Could be good to make a separate new wiki page whenever we want to discuss/comment on a particular spammer. Here we could keep notes on where a spammer's been sighted, what kind of spamming they do, what contact we have had with them, etc. This could all be indexed from a page called DiscussSpammers.
Then some other thoughts start ocurring to me. What would the naming convention be? Should we use the page cluster feature? (confusing huh?) Could we have a wiki link from every spammer page on the main website? hmmm Halz - 2004-11-05 15:20 UTC
Re-jiggling is what wikis are all about.
I guess that I created SpamReport to talk about known spammers and whether they are still active. A dedicated page for each spammer (linked from the chongqing pages at spammers.chongqed.org) might be a good idea. Or not. Spammers aren't identical with the spamvertized domains. Just think about the hundreds of sites that the wire mesh spammer is spamming for. But generally, I think that we could be a lot more liberal when it comes to creating new pages instead of going on and on on the same page.
I think we should start DiscussSpammers. And then whenever we need to discuss a new one, we add a little link on that page and start a page dedicated to the spammer. We might also experiment with links from the chongqing pages. It should be easy to add them: "Discuss this spammer with other wiki users: http://wiki.chongqed.org/?voip99.com". OTOH, google might start following these links and return lots of "Describe the new page here" results. Hmm indeed – Manni - 2004-11-05 17:49
A DiscussSpammers page sounds good to me. We are overusing the SpamReport page. It should be a mostly temporary holding place for reporting spam just like the submit spammer form on the main site. But it gives the benifit of a bit of discussion that the form doesn't. Its unlikely we will ever need to discuss most of the spammers in the database. There is only a small percentage that are interesting, extremely destructive, overly insane, etc. that are worth much discussing. And we wouldn't want Google indexing lots of blank pages. That can't help our PageRank. I have started to re-jiggle the SpamReport page and created some topic pages, spammer pages, and a DiscussSpammers page. The homepage did need help and you did improve it, but it could still use help, I am just not sure what to do with it. - Joe - 2004-11-05 19:33 UTC
While we're about it, I think we need to clarify where to discuss what on this wiki. Maybe I'm missinterpreting this, but on the HomePage it says "Discuss ways to fight spam on WikiSpam or BlogSpam", but these are not forum discussion pages like this one. They are just two article pages which define WikiSpam and BlogSpam, and describe ways of fighting them. To carify this (if indeed I am understanding correctly) we should avoid using the word 'discuss' on that homepage link.
Then we've also got DiscussChongqed, with sub-discussions TechnicalImprovements, TolerateOrFightSpammers, and SpamBot. Admittedly I've also muddied the waters by introducing discussion on the SpamReport page. All a bit confusing (especially for any newcomers we may have). Maybe I'm being excessively organised here, but I think we need to decide on a categorisation of discussions, and then make this clear on the HomePage – Halz 2nd Nov 04
You definitely got a point there, Halz. It's not very clear where we should be discussing what. If you see a way to make this more clear, please go ahead and edit the HomePage accordingly. I also think that it would not be a bad idea to create new pages now and then if there is something new to discuss. – Manni
Having spam attacks on http://cafoscari.wiki.taoriver.net/ Could you chongq, please? – MattisManzel
Hi Mattis. I guess cafoscari is now being hit by the same bunch of Chinese wiki spammers that I have seen elsewhere. Many of these are already chongqed. But others where too stupid to leave proper keywords (e.g. [1]). There's nothing we can do about these). Sei stark. – Manni