Wiki Spam is a form of WikiVandalism. It involves the adding of external links (or any other unwanted content) to promote irrelevent websites. Wiki websites often allow anyone to edit a page, even without requiring registration. This is a great thing, and fundamental part of the wiki philosophy. Editing can include the adding of external links (links to other websites), which is also a great thing. Unfortunately wiki spammers abuse this freedom, and use wikis to promote their websites. In particular they seek to improve their search engine rankings, by increasing the number of incoming links to their site, and they are willing to degrade and destroy the work of others in the process. It's sad that selfish people like this exist in the world.

Anti-spam procedure for users of FlexWikis.

As with any form of WikiVandalism, there is a SoftSecurity procedure to allow the community clear up the mess. No damage is permanent. To revert a page to a previous state, simply find the version you want to revert to, in the history list in the bottom left. Click 'Restore Version' to overwrite the spammed page with this older version. If you need to go back to even older versions, use the 'List all versions' link. Note that you should find the most recent version of the page prior to the spam attack. You dont want to revert other people's useful contributions.

On a heavily spammed wiki, you may find it difficult to identify the latest spam-free version of a page. This is because flexwiki doesn't have EditSummaries , which makes despamming flex wikis extremely difficult.

This is less of a problem, if legitimate users have been making edits using a user name (not just an I.P. address).

Note that to do this you simply enter a name in the right hand side form, when editing, but you have to follow the wiki standard name format, with at least two capital letters (for the first name and last name), otherwise it ignores it and you continue to show up as an IP address (this is a bug, but maybe its gone in newer versions)

Anti-spam recommendations for flexwiki administrators.

Check that you have a recent version of the FlexWiki software, which include the HyperlinkBlacklist and WikiCaptcha features. Use these and keep your blacklist up to date, to prevent the same spammers coming back repeatedly.

You will need to decide if you want to switch on NoFollow feature, which puts the rel=nofollow attribute on all external links. It is available in recent versions and switched on by default, but it is optional. You may decide you want to allow legitimate links from your wiki to boost page rank, however you then need to ensure that all links are legitimate.

If you allow spammers to be indexed, then they are getting their own way, and you helping to encourage them to spam more wikis. If you prevent it, spammers may not notice the difference (generally they are not smart enough), however this will reduce spam attacks, since they are less likely to find your wiki in the first place. Most spammers find a wiki, by using google to search for existing spam ( Spam-attracts-spam Effect )

See also: http://wiki.chongqed.org//FlexWiki

Wiki spam on flexwiki.com

Over the past couple of months, we have gotten a fair bit of spam. Thanks for your help in clearing it up!

You can also report incidents of spam on this site by contacting the AntiSpamTeam

What's Being Done

FlexWiki has implemented a variety of anti-spam measures recently including:

• administrator-accessible HyperlinkBlacklist
• support for NoFollow, the HTML hyperlink extension supported by Google, MSN, and many other search engines and blog systems
• preventing historical versions of topics from being indexed by search engines
• Support for enforcing WikiCaptcha on edit.

The HyperlinkBlacklist has been fairly successful, but implementing NoFollow in FlexWiki should help spammers realize that they're wasting their time and that placing links to their sites on FlexWiki won't help their search engine rankings.