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Contents 1 Page Naming 2 Links to Chinese Translations 3 Is Sandbox spam really "spam"? 4 Anywhere to report Wikipedia link spamming? 5 Added the rss method to filter out link spam 6 Is NoFollow an attribute? 7 can we do this in WP links? 8 redirects = stupid 9 Link-free spam 10 Blogspam 11 Is "nofollow" on Wikipedia information "convoluted"? 12 spam blacklisting leads here? 13 Usenet spamming 14 Yahoo and nofollow 15 Buying Blog comments? 16 Ajax not POST? 17 More than just blogs 18 Porpose removing "possible solutions" section

[edit] Page Naming

I moved this to Spam in blogs because:

1. it cannot be named Blog spam as there are two types of blog spam, one that is creating a blog with a malicious intent (a Spam blog), and the other one that is writing comments in the blog of somebody else
2. it cannot be named Link spam as link spam is more general, including link farms and other stuff.

See spamdexing for more details. ChaTo 17:20, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

I hope nobody minds me moving this here (this page used to be "Blog spam"), it seems more appropriate as the original page didn't particularly dwell on blogs.

The way I see things, We we are here :

• Spam
  • Spamdexing
    • Link Spam

The distinction between Search engine spam and "user-targeted" spam (gah ! Does anybody have a better word ?) may need some work on Spamming though. -- Flammifer 9 Oct 2004

I recently saw this kind of thing referred to as "Spam blog". Should there be a re-direct pointing to this page? Maybe a Wiktionary entry for Spam blog? --Bob Jonkman 22 September 2005

Spam blogs are blogs where actual posts are spam, not the comments as in link spam. Spamblog should not be included like it currently is on this page. Spamblogs (spam blogs) don't include random comments on blogs of innocent bystanders, that is Link spam or comment spam. Link spam is taking advantage of a site's ability for visitors to post links. If a site posts it's own spam that is a form of Spamdexing that is now called spam blog. -- JoeChongq 00:00, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

I am new to editing Wikipedia, but I agree with this move. I deal with this kind of spam a lot and it has always bothered me that this page was named Blog spam. Blog spam was what got this problem publisized last year and early this year, but the problem has been around for many years with guestbooks and is now moving away from blogs due to antispam features in most current blog software. It now mostly affects wikis where it is harder to implement good prevention measures due to the nature of wikis. --JoeChongq 00:22, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Heh, in case you didn't recognise me, I'm Emile Kroeger, we met on Chongqed wiki ^^ Flammifer 04:11, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Hi, I thought so. --JoeChongq 05:29, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Links to Chinese Translations

Any multilingual people? This would be a very good page on which to create some Wikipedia:Interlanguage_links. In particular to the chinese translation of this page (if it exists). A lot of wiki spam comes from China, and I wonder whether the chinese understand the problem at all.

At chongqed.org, we are asking for some help with chinese translations, to help raise awareness of the problem among chinese people, and to make sure chinese spammers at least realise they are doing something bad. Any help would be much appreciated, but a quick and easy step to start with, would be to make Wikipedia:Interlanguage_links to the chinese wikipedia. The same goes for the Spamming and Spamdexing article. Obviously I would do it myself, but I have no idea what the title translations are, or if they exist in chinese. -- Halz 09:08, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Here is the Chinese title: "爛撒連結". You could try and use Machine translation.

[edit] Is Sandbox spam really "spam"?

Sandboxes should be cleared often (twice daily should do it.) That would make Sandbox links inneffective at being valuable spam. Due to what a sandbox is supposed to be for, I can't see why people get upset over sandbox content -- --swirsky

During our spam fighting (and spam cleaning) activities at chongqed.org, we've observed a spam-attracts-spam effect, which means keeping a wiki clean of spam (including on the SandBox), will help prevent other spammers finding your wiki. I would also say that this abusive behaviour should not be tolerated, even if the editing rules for a sandbox page are not so strict. The idea of a sandbox page is to give new users a place where they feel free to experiment with wiki editing. Seeing a page full of links to viagra and porn, will certainly detract from this purpose.

So yes, I would say spam on a sandbox page is really spam, and as swirsky says, resetting the SandBox regularly is a good idea. -- Halz 09:08, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Anywhere to report Wikipedia link spamming?

Is there anywhere that it is possible to report link spamming in Wikipedia.

If it's a single incident - just be bold and remove it, and if it's a logged in user who just recently added it, you might notify him with a {{spam}} on his talk page. If it's repeatedly but not too much often you might also consider adding it to Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress. If it happens on a large scale and repeatedly then you can request the URL to be added in the global blacklist at Meta:Non-development_tasks_for_developers. andy 17:00, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Guidelines and policy at WP:EL ∴ here…♠ 10:51, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Added the rss method to filter out link spam

I run a number of mediawiki wikis with too few users to resolve the link spam problem. This method very effective one and I recommend it to other wiki maintainers. - User:RobKohr

[edit] Is NoFollow an attribute?

I was under the impression that in this case rel was the attribute and nofollow was the value.

[edit] can we do this in WP links?

I'd like to point to sites that certainly should not gain Googlejuice from it - can I do that in a Wiki link here? how? Midgley 16:45, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] redirects = stupid

Redirects have almost exactly the same effect as rel=nofollow.

I suggest deleting client-side javascript redirect information altogether, because it doesn't have any advantages over server-side, but has accessibility problems.

server-side redirect section should have note that's just implementation of rel=nofollow that is independent of search engine's support, and today it gives almost the same results as rel=nofollow.

[edit] Link-free spam

Anyone know of motives for spamming blogs with generic comments such as "cool site," "good information," etc. I started getting a lot of these after I started blocking all comments that contained links. They appear to be automated and come in batches (several at once). Maybe this could be addressed in the article. --Dbolton 04:55, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

• My guess is that the linking will be done by the user's homepage (the link you go to when you click on the user's name)... the link is set either when they registered, or will be changed to the actual target at a later date. Sometimes the new users don't even comment - they let the "list of users" page do the linking. Also, the generic comments are also sometimes really annoying: "wait, I don't understand. Can you explain it?" -- Morcheeba 17:28, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Blogspam

Blogspam redirects to this article. I always thought that blogspam was people's useless, stupid blogs with garbage writing, appearing on high traffic sites. Maybe someone could write a blog entry about this ;-) - Abscissa 14:40, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Blogspam appears mostly in interactive blogs, where the blogowners allow all visitors to leave remarks or articles on the topics. in the early times of blogging this was quite usual and harmless. since spammers are confronted with more and more financial loss because of anti-spam activities on the emailfrontier, they turned over to newsgroups, forums and personal blogs instead. Besides - it's not only possible to defeat it by filtering whole words - another method would be to filter special characters which spammers urgently need to use (like '$', '€', '<', '[', '/' and so on), after you have announced that at the very beginning of a new blogentry...--Ullipurwin 22:44, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Is "nofollow" on Wikipedia information "convoluted"?

I have attempted to roll back the sweeping censorship executed in this edit, and the previous one. I feel that before that user makes wholesale edits to this article again, there should be some discussion about the issue here, involving more than just a debate between two editors. --JossBuckle Swami 14:36, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

User:Ral315 makes a good point that this article may not be the place to discuss Wikipedia, regarding "spam in blogs". However, is Slashdot a blog? And, furthermore, why is there no article in Wikipedia about the "nofollow" tag itself? We are kind of left, here, with talking about "nofollow" within this larger framework. Should I create a new article, just about the "nofollow" tag? --JossBuckle Swami 05:59, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

I see this is also being discussed at WP:AN/I. Anyway, my point with the rewrite of the paragraph in question was pretty much the same as above: this article is about spam in blogs, and a lengthy discussion of the minute details of MediaWiki's rel="nofollow" features and their specific usage on Wikipedia is hardly relevant.

The other problem with that paragraph — besides the conspiratorial tone of the recent additions, which I already addressed in my first edit — was that it had basically just grown over the years, with new sentences appended every time some aspect of the nofollow handling changed. So it basically said "Wikipedia does this, only, now it does that, but now it does something else, only it just started doing something else again" without providing any reasonable historical perspective on the events it described.

Anyway, I have no problem with the current state of the section, which doesn't mention Wikipedia at all — after all, it's not really a "blog", and thus not relevant to the topic. I also feel that the idea of writing a separate rel="nofollow" article is an excellent idea, and will allow the various implementations of that feature on different sites and programs to be described in a proper context. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 10:05, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] spam blacklisting leads here?

why? --83.131.128.163 04:22, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Usenet spamming

As far as I know this phenomenon occurred in Usenet newsgroups long before Internet guestbooks appeared.
Simon de Danser 03:50, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Yahoo and nofollow

From my experiences, the Yahoo spider does not actually obey the 'nofollow' attribute on links --Pepolez 12:50, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Buying Blog comments?

Is this relevant to fighting comment spam, or just someone trying to drop a link to their spamming service? 203.97.2.142 22:50, 6 August 2007 (UTC) It looks like the latter to me.

[edit] Ajax not POST?

The Ajax section implies that the server can tell the difference between a POST submission through AJAX vs a regular POST. I think that needs to be more specific because without additional changes they to server calls are identical. Dw31415 14:17, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] More than just blogs

I don't feel the title of this article is accurate. There's plenty of "Comment spam" and "form spam" that has nothing to do with blogs. Comments on social networks (this would be also good to include) guestbooks, email forms (contact forms that are sent to someone's email), and just comments on anything really. All of these use forms, perhaps something more like "web form spam" or something? Blogs is too specific as many of the topics in this article can be applied to other types of web forms. --Dan Leveille^TALK 09:05, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree it's more than blogs, but I'd prefer "Comment spam" as the umbrella term, since it seems to be the most common term used, at least according to Google. Personally I'd like to see both this article and Forum spam merged into Comment spam.
--GunnarHj (talk) 16:26, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Porpose removing "possible solutions" section

Since Wikipedia is not a how-to guide, I propose removing the lengthy "possible solutions" section, especially since most of the content lacks sources, and thus tends to be little more than a list provided by editors views on the topic. --ZimZalaBim ^talk 19:35, 16 December 2008 (UTC)