[Pmwiki-users] external links in page history

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Mon Nov 29 07:12:04 CST 2004


A local user made a suggestion regarding wikispam + external links that
I'd like to pass by this group before implementing.

Right now, wiki spammers like to put links in open wiki sites in order
to drive more traffic to their sites and (presumably) increase their
Google page ranks.  It's fairly easy to remove such links by using the
page history + restore feature,  however, the links still appear in the
page history.

Now then, having the links in the page history doesn't help the spammers,
because the page history output contains <meta> information that tells 
Google not to index those pages.  Unfortunately, the wikispammers may not
realize this, so they're happy to keep spamming as long as their links
appear in the page history.

So, the obvious suggestion is to prevent such links from appearing as links
in the page history -- i.e., let the link address appear but not as a link.
This would make it clearer to a wikispammer that the page history isn't
going to help them much.  Alternatively, external links in the page history
could be converted entirely to non-http: text.

It seems like a simple suggestion with little downside, so I'm planning to
implement it in the next release.  But I wanted to check with this group to
see if there are any objections or issues I hadn't considered first.

Pm



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