In my previous post, I have outlined how I've hunted a spammer who has been vandalizing wikis on Wikidot.com - adding spam links to increase the page ranks for particular commercial websites, which in turn causes them to appear higher in search results at search engines.
For the moment, this particular spammer seems to have been driven away from Wikidot.com. But I was curious whether he had vandalized other wikis as well, and did Google searches for some of his keywords in addition to the keyword "wiki" to find out where else he has it.
The results were... not encouraging. Here is a a list of only the first 50 afflicted pages I have found:
- Association of Lisp Users
- BASES Wiki
- Bem-vindo ao Wiki do Projeto Software Livre Brasil
- Blag Linux And GNU
- Boston.pm News and Resources Wiki
- City of Heroes Vault
- CocoaDev Wiki
- Control Tier
- Consortium for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems
- DoWire's E-Democracy Best Practices Wiki
- EeeUser Eee PC
- Enlightened Perl Organization Home
- fdiary.net wikifarm
- Flyer Guide.com Wiki
- FrAndroid Wiki
- FreeBSD Wiki @Taiwan
- GeekDinner Wiki
- Gender Wiki
- Global Villages Info Wiki
- GT System Wiki
- Howard Forums
- IKM Emergent
- Jakarta-Cactus Wiki
- Java User Group Milano
- Java User Group Torino
- Knowmore.Org Wiki
- Licence to Kill Wiki
- LXDE Wiki
- Meatball Wiki
- MediaLab Prado
- Mondo Rescue devel pages
- OpenInkPot
- OpenLayers Wiki
- Podster.de
- Replicant Wiki
- Repository Aggregator
- Root.cz
- SCOME Wiki
- SelbstOrganisations Wiki
- SimplePie Wiki
- Sourceforge.net Wiki
- squirrel's community wiki
- TextMate Wiki
- Varamozhi wiki
- Warp Spawn Games Wiki
- Wiki de PMB
- Wikinvest
- Wiki Ubuntu Indonesia
- Young Adult Library Services Association
- ZoneMinder Wiki
After that, I gave up. There are too many, and they are scattered on too many different wiki farms. And with that, I can only conclude that this spammer has won. I might be able to keep him off Wikidot.com, but on most of these wikis his spam links will stay until either their hosts go broke or until the Internet as a whole collapses into a black hole of spam. This is a problem that is even beyond Anonymous to solve - he has scattered his vile seed too far and wide. If you want to get a grasp of just how wide this particular spammer has cast his net, try these following searches with some of his favorite keywords:
- "aksesoris sparepart motor" - 23,100 results
- "bisnis online lokal" - 10,500 results
- "hipnoterapi surabaya" - 1,870 results
Some of these are duplicates, but many are not - and that's only using some of his keywords. He will just keep on going and adding his spam to any wikis that are not sufficiently protected and where the owners do not pay constant attention.
And that's just one spammer (or a single team) - and their numbers are legion! Every spammer has their own websites to promote, and they all scan the Internet for wikis to defile. If you are maintaining or participating in a wiki as well, they will come for it too - the only real way of defending yourself is to limit its use to invited members. Which in turn runs contrary to the promise of openness that originally started wikis.
Sure, right now it might still be sufficient to just revert the occasional spam that comes your way. But the tide of spam will continue to rise until you are forced to resort to more drastic measures. And what then? Will there one day be a new medium that allows open, public collaboration in the way wikis do, or is this form of collaboration doomed?
You tell me. Right now, I am rather depressed in the face of the scale of this problem.
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