Forum:Spammer
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Oh dear, I have a spammer on my Wiki. I have been here before: many years ago I spent real money having "ChesterWiki" hosted on the web, and some spammers started posting pages and pages of cr&p, and huge JPGs, on the Wiki - the result - (its a long story) - was that the host deleted the entire site (without informing me). Yes, years of work - gone - but for the "Wayback Machine" which saved me. Worse still, the host also never bothered to inform me when the domain name expired - so it was bought up cheap by someone who is offering to sell it back to me (not cheap).
So now I have a new instance of the Wiki, new name, lots of broken links to my old wiki, and the spammers have just come back, creating new pages that contain links pointing to all sort of rubbish.
My issue is that the "spammer" (he goes by the name of "Alexcross") doesn't appear to have signed up as a member/user of my wiki, but (bear with me, I'm new to this) may have got access to another wiki which gives some kind of global log-in - I simply do not see this user as having signed-up for my wiki. So what is the best way to handle this? My own solution would be to find out where he lives and pay a visit with a cricket bat and intent to commit GBH. As that might not be entirely legal, I have banned the user, deleted the pages etc.
Any advice?
Hooligan (talk) 15:52, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
- I check Special:RecentChanges on my wiki every day to catch spammers. If you check at least every few days, spam is unlikely to pile up to the point of your site being deleted. I doubt Shoutwiki would do that without at least warning you with an email.
- Most spammers give up after each of their usernames is blocked. Usernames used for spam can be blocked permanently. I block specific IPs for a month. Dynamic IPs are recycled among users of an ISP so I don't want to block people other than the spammer. That is more likely the longer the block. At one point there was a spammer that kept coming back and posting similar types of articles under various IPs and names. So the Shoutwiki staff set up a filter that blocked all new articles containing certain words. See:
- http://cannabis.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter
- It can be found in Special:SpecialPages on your wiki. I think we admins can set up filters too. See:
- http://cannabis.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter/new --Timeshifter (talk) 06:09, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Hi Timeshifter,
Many thanks for the useful comments and advice. As it happens the "Spammer" has not been back. However, I am tempted to use a permanent block on the IP address given my past experience where my Wiki was subjected to so much spam that the hosting company deleted it. What puzzles me is why they spam with some of the stuff they do ("make bentwood furntiture" for example): I guess its probably some means of luring grannies to sites that will zombie their box, or whatever. Had a look at your site, and as I suffer very badly from arthritis, you get my vote! Unfortunately, you have the "Moralistic Minority" on the other side - and I can well understand their position: I have a neighbour who likes Shostakovich (I have never listened to it), he plays it through headphones so I can't hear it, but he's obviously a digger-deviant and should be locked-up ... which presumably someone elses taxes will pay for.... :) - sad isn't it.
Hooligan (talk) 13:40, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
- Hi Hooligan,
- ShoutWiki won't delete a site just because it has a lot of spam. In fact we'll help you clean it up :).
- Best regards,
- --Cook879
talk 15:03, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
Hi Cook,
Thanks for the kind words. Indeed I suspect they wouldn't. The problem I had was with "Siteground" - they simply wouldn't accept that I was the author of the wiki and let me have the necessary passwords to login, but despite their "assurance" that they would not delete the database until I had the opportunity to clean it up (remove spam) - they had in fact already deleted it. What made it even more annoying was that they offered no refund on the annual hosting charges and let the domain name go without even telling me. I would describe their service as "execrable", if I was being polite, otherwise I would say it rhymes with "slight", starts with $, ends with € and has "hit" in the middle :).
