At a presentation I did last week, Wes Fryer was in the audience and asked me how we deal with spam in our wikis. (I hoped that he asked because he had a brilliant answer himself, but alas not.) For wikis, we try to monitor recent changes and revert spam out as quickly as possible. It’s not an ideal solution.

For my blogs, I find that the spam-catching feature on WordPress is very good. (As it tells me every time I log in, it has caught many thousands of spams for me.) Occasionally, it flags one of my own comments as spam (usually one where I’ve posted a whole slew of links), but that’s ok. After I go crazy trying to figure out where my post is, I fix it in a matter of seconds.

Today, I went to a web form that didn’t accept anything with any web links (to weed out potential spam). Wow! I had to edit my whole message. It’s hard for me to converse about anything without any links. 🙂

Anyone out there have any other ideas for catching spam on wikis and blogs?

Image credit: David Hegarty; used under a Creative Commons NC license.

Sidenote: Did you know they make sushi out of Spam? This is the kind of thing you could only know because of incredible world of user-generated content.

The Spam Problem

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.