Take a look here: wiki4all.com/catalog/WiKi4All:Village_Pump#Hosted_by_a_wiki_spammer.21
Unless I am I missinterpreting this, this guy 'Oleg Popov', is having a bit of a laugh at the expense of the wiki communnity.
He set up wiki4all.com on 2nd May 2005 and went around hundreds of wikis posting a message inviting people to contribute to it (lots of seemingly legit incoming links) His initial set-up also included a few links promoting 'PESwiki' and 'pure energy systems'. Innocent enough perhaps.
Since then he has ignored everyone and paid no attention to the community of contributors who had congregated there.
It now emerges that the same server is hosting a load of pharmaceutical spamming domains, also owned by Oleg. He doesn't log in as Oleg when he is spamming, but these domain names reveal more of the sneaky div tag trick across many wikis.
So what was wiki4all.com all about? It seems to me it was all a big pagerank game, and the wiki community has played into his hands. He has links to this domain even on wikipedia. It could be he is genuinely interested in a running a wiki of his own, as well as in wiki spamming, but it seems to me we should clean up his messages, and try to move content off wiki4all.com before abandoning it. – Halz - 14th Sept 2005
I don't think you will convince people to abandon the wiki. It seems to have built up a strong community without the spammer being involved since near the beginning. Since he isn't involved I don't see how he is using it to better his PageRank on his other spammy sites. The PageRank of his site certainly isn't doing great, only PR4.
His user page on that wiki and on Wikipedia says: "I have 24/7 access to the Internet and my favourite hobby to read and study wiki sites :)"
That makes me think it could be all about studying the way wikis grow.
– Joe - 2005-09-14 21:56 UTC
Bare in mind this exact same message was posted on hundreds of wikis. OK so that could just be well-meaning but dubious promotional tactic. However I suspect the message is deliberately crafted to give wiki enthusiasts a warm feeling and trust towards him, and really the only thing he's interested in experimenting with, is PageRank.
He's put minimal effort into wiki4all.com. He just set up a few pages, then linked to it from all over the place, before disappearing, and ignoring the new community completely. The community raised concerns about the hosting, and the fact that Oleg was un-contactable. It remains to be seen how they will react to the news that he is a spammer.
As you say though, he isn't really using wiki4all.com to better his PageRank on his other spammy sites. Worst case scenario would be that he is planning to swap in a spammy site in place of the wiki at some point. But maybe he's just playing around. Either way he's not a very good host for that 'directory of wikis'. I hope they move the content elsewhere. – Halz - 2005-09-15 10:23 UTC
Maybe Google was trying to tell us that they were about to go live with Google Blog Search? – Manni - 2005-09-14 11:31
Very interesting. I hope they don't take blogs out of the regular search results, so many websites are some form of blog now that would really wipe out a large portion of their index. Your blog does show up there for "chongqed.blogspot.com", but not for link or site searches, it doesn't appear at all in the regular search. – Joe - 2005-09-14 10:20 UTC
More info on their about page. It apparently will be a seperate index of blogs that will allow them to keep more up to date with blog updates by using the blogs' RSS/Atom feeds. It doesn't sound like they are removing blogs from their regular search, they just won't be as up to date. – Joe - 2005-09-14 21:56 UTC
I am sure Dan and WikiMinion will be buddies. ;-) – Joe - 2005-09-06 20:35 UTC
Some more details about this. It was the second post that got caught by Dan, not the first as one might have thought. Both posts where manual, using a browser that loaded the style sheet. The second left a referrer from Google; it was a search for Chinese spam. – Manni - 2005-09-03 12:05
The month of August was the busiest month in WikiMinion's history of cleaning up WikiSpam. In August WikiMinion detected and reverted nearly 32,000 spam edits. Ouch, my poor smoking bandwidth! – RichardP - 2005-08-03 02:15
Wow. How come WikiMinion was that busy? More spam? Or more wikis on your list? – Manni - 2005-09-01 08:27
There was only a small increase in the number of wiki's cleaned by WikiMinion in August. The cause was definitely more spam, more than half of it originating from the Atrivo net block (69.50.160.0/19). – RichardP - 2005-08-03 02:54