Wiki spam

Site & Project
1

Looks like someone from IP 201.129.146.168 spammed the wiki at November 18, 2004, at 03:26 PM. Taken from the page history. Removed the links, not with "restore" though… not sure if restore keeps any records or not.

2

thanks for catching it.

3

Oops… forgot to login ://

4

DarkProphet removed some more spam on the wiki… seems that someone has this wiki on a list somewhere.



Would it be possible to share the user database from this forum with the wiki, i.e require a forum registration to be able to change the wiki? Should solve the problem at least. Not that it’s a huge problem with the spam, but as I hate spammers I like to make it difficult for them :wink:

5

My knowledge of the wiki is fairly limited, pmwiki doesn’t appear to have much in the way of user security. If we were to use another wiki that requires a database (MySQL) that would also be a problem. I’ve used up my 3 instances of MySQL I’m allowed on the server (Mainpage CMS, forum, my blog).

6

I didn’t find any db connection on their site either… unfortunately, it’s only possible to set one password for the different actions.



However I found this filter addition:

PmWiki | Cookbook / Blocklist



Seems easy to use… perhaps it would be enough?

7

Cool, I’ll put that in, at least keep the same spammers from coming back if nothing else.

8

ok, the blocklist is up and running. Haven’t tested it, can’t exactly block myself.

9

Hadn’t thought spam could be used for anything but getting people to a site before, so it seemed to be quite stupid what they did here. But of course it is as they say on the pmwiki-site, to increase google (and others?) link-to ratings. How damn annoying! }:-@

10

Hmm… the blocklist doesn’t seem to work.



Perhaps you forgot to include the code line in config.php?

11

The block list was just formatted wrong, the ‘’ at the end was screwing it up. I removed those and the filters seem to be working. Now I just have to find the page on how to password protect the blocklist.

12

To change just one page add

?action=attr
to the page-url and you’ll be able to set passwords.

13

Here are a the most common words in the most recent wiki spam attack:

cialis

redi.tk

levitra

xanax

ambien



And these might also be a good idea to block:

buy

cheap

purchase

order

discount

14

added to blocklist.

15

Well, seems like they are trying to sneak away with the spam on sub pages now. A minor success for us at least :slight_smile: Hehe… it’s probably not much work for them to add the spam, but on the other hand it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes for me to remove it and post here either.



A couple of new words for the filter:

marketing

business

sex

kgc-networks

16

One of the new aspects of web site spam (I get this on my blog comments from time to time) is that with Google’s page ranking system you get rewarded for having lots of pages linking to you even if the links are spam.

"Guest" wrote:
Even more spam in the menu and the main page. How annoying... do they really think anyone will ever click any of those links?

So no they don't really expect people to take the link seriously, only the Google spider.
17

Yeah I found out about that to. Well, I guess they will always come up with new ways of spamming us.

18

Since pmwiki is an open source system it would probably be quite easy to add that oneself. But so far it seems that the blocklist is working good enough. Who knows, there might even be an extension for this kind of spam already. If it gets worse again I might check into that.