[Foundation-l] Next step in the spam arms race.

Sun Apr 9 15:06:41 UTC 2006

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>Seems like the spammers have found the web equivalent of an smtp open relay.
>
>For example:
>[http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks/DOWNLOAD/sb/index.htm sitz bath]
>[http://www.buddy4u.com/view/?u=monophonic+ringtone monophonic ringtone]
>[http://www.buddyprofile.com/viewprofile.php?username=nextelringtone
>nextel ringtone]
>
>
>Things like this make nofollow more attractive all the time.  Has
>there ever been any discussion on perhaps allowing a white-list for
>non-spam sites that we won't no-follow?  This would be useful for
>wikis who don't want to kill all their externals with no-follow.
>  
>
As a general policy, this would be inappropriate use of user pages on 
Wikimedia projects and I wouldn't hesitate to delete conent of this 
nature immediately if found, block the user account, and seek a 
checkuser scan to block the IP address as well (if it were initiated 
from a registered user account).  Link spamming has been a persistant 
problem on Wikimedia projects anyway, although there has been some 
efforts to try and root that problem out by preventing new users and 
anonymous ip addresses from adding external links to pages.

In term of general spamming and such, yeah, the internet is a far 
different place than it was 15 years ago when I got my first regular 
internet e-mail account and was involved with USENET.  Spam has all but 
completely killed that service.  I wish the various ISPs were more 
agressive in policing their users against this sort of activity, but it 
is economically useful to ignore that spamming even occurs with their 
accounts.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning