On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, John Pybus wrote:
Bryce Harrington wrote:
All of the suggestions in this thread are viable options, although some will require more work than others:
- Changing the password: Trivial, easy to do
- Blocking more IP's: Trivial, easy to do
- Adding basic auth login: Requires sysadmin work + ongoing account admin
- Adding adv. auth login: Requires perl or php coding + sysadmin work
- Randomizing password: Requires a little perl coding
- Randomized image: Requires more perl coding
- Changing wiki's: Requires sysadmin work + lots of content conversion
Changing the code to add rel="nofollow" to links, should also help discourage spammers by making their links worth less. See:
http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
Of course this also means links people post to the wiki stop counting towards search rankings, but it may be a price worth paying.
Actually, we already have the robots.txt file stopping indexing entirely, but that hasn't stopped the spamming. Converting to the rel="nofollow" approach would be better in that our wiki would get google indexed, but spammers still would not get credit. On the other hand I doubt it'd make any impact on the quantity of spam (I expect spammers are ignoring both robots.txt and rel="nofollow".) But if anyone would like to implement this, go for it, it's a good idea.
Bryce