Filters for Spam on the Wiki

06/15/2004

I grew up in a small town where people never locked their doors at night. In fact, some houses didn’t even have locks on their front doors. So I am particularly disgusted at the Chinese spammers who have decided to repeatedly attack our Wiki.

As always, there is a technological solution. For the moment, I have implemented both a “deny list” for known offenders and simple content filtering. Folks who type in offensive links are automatically added to the deny list.

Now comes the fun part: the stuff we’re being spammed with right now is easy to detect; they stuff in links to improve their google ranking, etc. But what happens when they move beyond that? Bayesian filtering to the rescue!

Yes, just like we filter e-mail, the time will come soon when we’ll have to filter Wiki posts as well.

Just wait till they start spamming your cell-phone…