Re: [Axiom-developer] Mathaction and Spammers

[Ralf Hemmecke]

Hi Bill,

On 04/06/2006 02:06 PM, Bill Page wrote:
> On April 6, 2006 7:27 AM Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
> > Look at
> >
> > http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/MathActionDevelopment
> >
> > it seems that spammers somehow can extract the mathaction 
> > email-address and write to such a page.
>
> I have deleted the spam. In fact I have regularly deleted about
> 3 or 4 examples of this kind of spam on the Axiom Wiki almost
> everyday over the last month or so. This spam is not coming via
> email. Believe it or not some abuser actually goes to the trouble
> of posting such messages to random pages. The point, I think, is
> to increase the "link counts" to the target pages by "seeding"
> links to the pages from where ever wiki software allows them to
> add links. This makes it much more likely that the search engines
> like google will index their pages.

Very cool! I really hope that some day such people can be sued and 
punished. They cost other people's time.

> I regularly use "recent changes" to check for this stuff and
> delete it using the Zope undo feature (if possible, sometimes it
> is not if there has been an later update to the wiki), or by
> copying an earlier un-spammed version of the page to current.

Well actually you deserve a BIG THANKS for all this work. Where would 
Axiom be today without all your effort.

> > Can there something be done (apart from manually removing it)?

> One thing that would slow them down at least would be to require
> users to identify themselves via 'preferences' before being allowed
> to post a comment.

But they still could edit the page, I have no idea whether they could 
let a program automatically edit a page, though.

> > Bill, is there a way to include a spamchecker?

> I will look into this some more, but it is difficult on the web.
> The Zwiki developers have been struggling with this for some time.

I am not so much into this busines, but what I think is that before 
anything from a comment is added to the page it is sent through a 
spam-filter like SpamAssassin using its Bayesian option.

Ralf