Deleting Spam

We get hit by a fair amount of spam for porn links, as I'm sure you're well aware. Lovely 61.55 has been spamming regularly these days, and 81.1 did some big numbers on us about in early June 2004. Back when 81.1 hit dozens of pages with porn links, one of the VolunteerHousekeepers (I can't remember who now) contacted me after he deleted the links from several of the pages and asked me to "touch" those pages so that the links would be removed from the quickDiffs. So I touched his fixed pages and he touched mine.

A few points have occurred to me:

• We have minors lurking here at Wiki and sometimes participating. Granted the minor would have to hit the "last edited" date to reach deleted porn links, but I still think we shouldn't have those links lying around so accessible.
• Google indexes a page's quickDiff, which persists until the day the page is double deleted. If the search spider happens to come along while there's a spam link in the quickDiff, the spammer's PageRank goes up. Meanwhile, Google or no Google, the RecentChangesJunkies and WikiStalkers who hit the page's "last edited" date all get a glimpse of the tantalizing links.
• Google indexes a page's history if the page has been edited within a few days before the spider's visit. If there's a porn link in the history, at least it's not a true <a href> link and it won't have much effect on PageRank. Also, Google or no Google, poking around in the history is awkward, and you'd have to be really desperate for porn excitement to go looking for it there.

Because of the quickDiff issues and the fact that we have minors, I suggest that porn spam links be deleted by one WikiGnome and the page "touched" by another. To "touch" the page, do a "minor edit" of the page. Any change to the page will do, even a trivial edit. If you don't have the time or inclination for anything energetic or brain-taxing, just add a blank space somewhere to the page, like after the end of a sentence.

-- ElizabethWiethoff

If you'd rather double touch the page yourself to ensure the links are removed from the diff, you can go to anonymizer dot com and quickly do a minor edit from there. This still doesn't remove the links from Google's view because Google indexes the history pages too at http://c2.com/wiki/history/

If we start doing this, right from the beginning, let's frown heavily as a community, upon doing this for anything other than porn spam. One thing I really like about Wiki is the open process. I can quickly see such quickdiff covering becoming quite the rage for removing comments by unwelcome guests, etc.

And another idea about the double touching of a page to remove bad links. How about if on the first edit you remove the links but add a standard tag line, like maybe just add "DeletingSpam" (no quotes). And on the second edit just remove that tag line. That way people will know what happened, and why a page was edited twice, by looking at the diff. When deleting non-porn spam links, this double touch stuff isn't really as necessary, since like I said Google will see the links in the history pages regardless. WardCunningham might want to add an htaccess or robots.txt directive blocking Google from http://c2.com/wiki/history/. [There now is "Disallow: /wiki/history" in RobotsDotTxt.] THEN, double touching would be a good idea when removing any kind of spam links, vulgar or not. So maybe we should rename this page DeletingSpam. (I went ahead and did that; my first idea was for DeletingVulgarLinks.)

Why not RobotsDotTxt the quickdiffs script? Ward would have to do it but it would save a lot of all this effort. -- JeremyBowers