Admin:Spam Removal

NOTE: While this page is intended for wiki administrators (ordinary users do not have access to ban spam users or delete spam pages), anyone is welcome to read it.

The Problem: Wiki Spammers

In general, if Google sees that website A links to website B, it assumes people like website B, so it raises B's "page rank" (although that's an oversimplification). Because of this, spammers promote garbage websites by adding links to them ... and that often means exploiting wikis like this one.

Preventing spam is hard. Automation lets spammers sign up with a fresh account each time (so banning them doesn't help), and they can flood the wiki with garbage pages/links.

The Solution: Signups

One solution is to add a "CAPTCHA" to the wiki's signup process, making it much harder for the spammer to automate account creation.

Unfortunately, there are only two people who could add such a CAPTCHA: Rogean and Rahvin. Neither has the capacity to implement the CAPTCHA (Rogean's busy running the project and Rhavin hasn't played in years). Furthermore, because our wiki is stuck on an old version of the MediaWiki software, such a CAPTCHA might require custom coding.

I have written to Rogean offering to help, and requesting the necessary (system) admin access, but for now Rogean/Rhavin have decided to simply disable signups completely.

The Solution: Clearing Spam

With new signups locked, we no longer have to worry about new spam accounts, so it's at least possible to delete all the spam pages/users. However, there are a lot to clean up, and each ban and page deletion takes time.

The Spam Deletion Bookmarklet

Thus, Loramin created the Spam Deletion Bookmarklet. To "install" it, just click on one of the links below, then drag it to your browser's bookmark bar/list.

The bookmarklet is designed for mass clean up, and is intended to be used on a search results page. On such a page, click the bookmarklet, then click on a spam link. If everything works properly the page will be deleted, and the account which created it will be banned.

The bookmarklet comes in two forms. The first is "one use": click it, delete one page, and then click it again to delete another. The second version permanently puts you into "click to delete" mode; you will have to refresh your browser tab to return to normal browsing.

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Improving the Bookmarklet

If you are a programmer, please feel free to improve the bookmarklet. Both the "built" version and the original code can be found at MediaWiki:SpamRemoval.js.

To "build" it, simply update the original code, then use the URL (see comments) to convert it into a bookmarklet-friendly format (escaping quotes, newlines, etc.). Finally, set the "escapedOneUseBookmarklet" code to the converted version (and save the file).

Possible future improvements;

• Change the mouse cursor to a trash can icon when the bookmarklet is active
• Change links on the page (to be red, bold, have a trash can icon next to them, etc.) when the bookmarklet is active.
• Delete the search result from the DOM after its matching page is deleted
• Sometimes the spammer uses multiple accounts to edit a page (to make it look more official?), but this bookmarklet only deletes one "creator"; a nice enhancement would be to ban every user who edited ... but we have to be careful not to ban someone who edited a spam article to delete its content