[Pmwiki-users] More anti-spam ideas

[Patrick R. Michaud]

Everyone has had some excellent comments on dealing with wiki spam.
I'll just add that, at least in the new version of PmWiki, it will
be possible to take many approaches to solving the external link
problem.  Some have already been discussed.  I think we need
a mechanism that allows us to whitelist (approve) urls that 
are valid, blacklist (disallow) urls that are invalid, and 
have a way to easily add new urls to the lists.  Furthermore,
the whitelist and blacklisting mechanisms ought to have a
wildcarding mechanism, so that one can invalidate individual
pages or entire domains.

Of course, I think the easiest way to maintain a list of 
urls is in one or more wiki pages, so we'll go with that.
We can develop a system whereby any url appearing in a wiki page
is first compared against a set of pages containing whitelisted
and blacklisted urls.  If the url is whitelisted, it's treated
as a normal link and everything is just fine.  If it's
blacklisted, then it is either suppressed (displayed as
text only with no link anchor), or else it is converted into
a link to a "BlackList" page that describes what's wrong with
the link.

The remaining urls--those that do not appear on either list--
can then be treated a number of different ways.  My favorite
at the moment is for any non-listed URL to be rendered as a
link to an "approval system" whereby authors with the appropriate
authorization can easily add the url to one of the lists.

I may try to prototype something along these lines on the 
development site just so we can see how it comes together.

Pm