[Pmwiki-users] Feature-request: deleting revisions

*** Dave Hill dave
Sat May 15 20:52:07 CDT 2004


<Pm>
> Yes, they still appear in the revisions, but the output of page
> revisions normally contains a <meta> tag with 'noindex,nofollow',
> so any reputable search engine shouldn't index those.  Of course,
> the wiki spammers may not realize this (or care), so...

Having (alas) a great deal of experience with blog spammers, even if you throw
a big message up on the screen saying that spam material is blocked, filtered,
reviewed, zapped, blacklisted, whatever, or that URLs are being redirected so
that you can't get any Googlerank benefit, it doesn't make any different.
Spammers will spam.

> I'm having similar problems with wikispam on my system, as you
> may have noticed.  But I figure that the fact that links appear
> in the page history isn't doing the spammers much good because
> of the meta tag.  My next approach is going to be to create a
> "blacklist.php" module so that an admin can identify IP ranges
> (and possibly domains) from which all posts should be blocked.
>
> Reactions, comments?

Blacklisting by IP and IP range is dubious, to be honest.  IP ownership
changes, and most spammers change IP addresses fairly quickly.  Way too high a
false positive rate, potentially.  Plus, unless you're going to
pool/coordinate/manage IP addresses, everyone is going to have to start from
scratch, which makes a blacklist a lot less useful.

*** Dave




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