wiki spam goes human powered August 22, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , trackbackWiki spambot fighting is an occupational hazard, but not something that bothers me too much these days. I try not to over react and avoid locking down pages as much as possible. There’s no need to make a whole wiki login-to-edit or install annoying captchas and so on. My approach is usually based on banning keywords in the type of sites spammers are promoting. So if you tried to add text and links with references to viagra or lotto onto the cider wiki for example, you’ll find that the page doesn’t get saved. The only downside is that the cider makers might want just possibly want to write something about viagra and lotto on the cider wiki . In a broad topic based wiki such as wikipedia, that would not be the solution.
Now via Facebook, Colin Donald of Futurescape has told me of a new scourge - human powered wiki spammers.
Internet Futures: Chinese human-powered spam
Automated responses won’t work nearly as easily when there’s a real intelligence on the spamming side, rather than a bot. Yet the cost of using people to defend against this on the receiving end would very quickly be disproportionate.
I suppose it’s all part of the co-evolution of a predator / prey ecology but unfortunately it seem to be one in which if there is any weakness on behalf of the wiki techologist, then the predator, against advice from the lessons of population simulation software, is all to often willing to kill the prey it depends upon.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
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