wiki drug spam



I'm an administrator for a music wiki, which generally requires little or no time on my part. I often feel that I'm not doing my part sometimes, because there frankly just isn't that much to do. However, of late I've noticed that the wiki is getting hit with a lot of spamming. Not the e-mail spam, but rather the posting of promotional (usually pharmaceutical-related) fake pages that contain XML code pointing to brand name drugs and other items. What is happening is people are registering under an assumed name, editing or creating faux pages and populating it with XML code. In many cases, the code is invisible except in the Edit mode; perhaps what is going on is that the XML tags can be used by a spammer to pull in content from other sites. In any case, it's a shame; the entire point of a wiki is to enable the community to create and edit pages and in the aggregate, contribute a lot of accurate, free content for the community to share.

But then, even wikipedia has been hit recently with problems in the form of fake pages. In that case, it wasn't by a spammer, but rather someone who was trying to play a practical joke on the subject of the wiki page entry. It backfired, big time.

Posted: Tue - December 13, 2005 at 08:28 AM          

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