Tuxfutter:Community Portal

From Tuxfutter

Search engine optimization spam

I've read about wiki spam because I have encountered it. I give now a mini-lecture on it. -Hapsiainen 20:48, 30 Oct 2005 (CET)

• Why they are spamming? They want to improve their customers' sites' page rank in search engines that measure pages' importance by how often it is linked.
• How can I empty such treacherous plans? If you can't change the search engines, change your wiki. Make it ask the search engine spiders not to use its external links in counting page ranks. You do this by using rel=nofollow link attribute. Such is also possible with MediaWiki - but not turned on in this wiki. You might have to update to MediaWiki 1.5.1 to be able to use it, though.
• I've seen wikis that make use of this option, but are still spammed. What other things can I do? Chongqed.org and Meta-wiki have lists of such things. It is possible to have spam blacklists and to block spamming users and IPs. See Meta-wiki:Anti-spam features, Chongqed.org:MediaWiki.

No problem :) Well, I have read some posts on MediaWiki mailing lists and an upgrade is really the best answer to that spam problem. As you may have noticed, today the wiki was a bit unstable due to changes. I updated from 1.3 to 1.4. I hope I can make the next step to 1.5 during the next days. I tried it at home on my own linux box and ran into real trouble :( One of the points that makes upgrades so hard is that all code is read from a CVS tree by a cronjob into the directories on the web server. So keep your fingers crossed that database and wiki code survive the next upgrade ;) Regards, HaukeZuehl 22:13, 30 Oct 2005 (CET)