RE: [Axiom-developer] Mathaction and Spammers

[Bill Page]

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.

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.


> 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.
 
> 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.

Regards,
Bill Page.