Tom Heath - Jesus Loves Spammers

Jesus Loves Spammers

Monday, 4. September 2006, 11:35:20

spam, wiki, jesus, god, ringtones, openguides, milton keynes

The plague of Ringtone wiki spam hitting the Open Guide to Milton Keynes has reached a new low. Now it seems even God and Jesus are getting in on the spam act, with this unsolicited advert for "Free Christian Ringtones". Sigh.

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Comments

kmakice # 4. September 2006, 13:57

I met Mark at WikiSym 2006 (I gave a talk right after his) when he discussed this Milton Keynes site. Do you think the community is large enough to self-police this spam in a practical way, or are there other steps that can be taken (i.e. requiring logins, version approval - like the German wikipedia is doing/about to do, or some kind of subscription to a communal policing tool, such as Akismet does with WordPress blogs)?

tomheath # 4. September 2006, 14:36

Hi K, and thanks for your comments. Hope you enjoyed WikiSym2006; sounds like a great event. As to your question, honestly right now I think the answer is "no", the community is not large enough to practically keep a lid on this. Unfortunately, however large we manage to grow the community, IMHO the spam will keep on coming and keep on increasing in volume.

At this stage I think that technical solutions are the only option, at least as a first line of defense. We're currently talking to the OpenGuides community about how we might deal with this, and requiring logins seems a very likely route. Akismet also sounded really nice from Mark's descriptions, and something else for us to look at.

I'm interested in your locked-down approach in PoliticWiki; was this been a barrier to participation, in your opinion? (apologies if you cover this in the paper; I haven't had the chance to read it all yet).

Cheers, Tom.

mgaved # 4. September 2006, 14:58

Hi Kevin! great to hear from you. I go with Tom ,and I think that we're now into an escalating 'arms race' with the spammers. We're going to chat amongst the Open Guides admins, and I think there will be some thoughts about a common solution. I think that as a small community project, we're always going to be at a disadvantage trying to manually housekeep our wiki against attacks and we'll need to look at tools that can help with the job. Akismet as recommended by Sunir Shah (thanks Sunir!) certainly sounds worth investigating and my feeling is we'll probably have to move to some sort of procedure beyond allowing completely open anonymous posting to filter out the cruder attacks. The surreality of some of the spam is amusing at the moment, but probably not for much longer! I have a feeling we're going to be on a stiff learning curve in the near future.

Any thoughts, links, advice welcomed on approaches to take!

cheers, Mark