Blasted spam

Spam exists in many forms. There’s junk mail (credit-card and loan offers and other crud), telemarketers, survey-takers, cellphone spam, email spam, usenet spam, and one of the more recent members in the family is Wiki-spam, and anyone who’s read this blog for some time or reads or writes one themselves will know about the comment-spam crud.

The comment-spam continue to exist because of people’s desire to be anonymous and with that allowing lack of accountability, or the other side’s desire to be read and commented on, and as a result not wanting to create too many speed bumps for people to sign up and write comments on their entries.

The Wiki-spam has a similar reason for existing. The idea behind Wiki is to allow anyone to contribute, with as few obstacles as possible. This means that in many Wiki instances you can just browse a page, decide to hit the Edit button, and make some modifications. Some Wikis politely suggest you may want to create a Wiki account but they are far too nice about it.

The result: Pages full of spam links, or hundreds of pages created just to cross-reference eachother so that they in turn can, for instance, increase the Google rank of some other page, making it more important.

The last few weeks I’ve been cleaning up some crud on the original DGD Wiki which was created about a year ago and, after an initial burst of activity, left to gather dust a bit, sadly. Today, as I was cleaning up some more and then noticed dozens of new pages being created, more than I could ever wish to clean up with the limited tools I have (I’m just another user on that Wiki, not the admin), I figured enough was enough and installed the Wiki with which I have the most experience myself, TWiki, as we use it at work. It has support for requiring authentication for viewing, modifying or renaming topics and you can define different groups with different levels of access, which is just what we needed.

So after a morning of figuring out how to do this from scratch (in a manner of speaking, I did use the existing Debian package, but my webserver setup is not what they assume it to be) and an afternoon of taking pages from the original MoinMoin Wiki and translating them to TWiki-ese, we now have a new DGD Wiki! Now the task of trying to keep some momentum in that one… ugh :-)