Hi, everyone!
My hope with this post is to merely gauge the community’s level of interest in enhancing the Talk Page Policy
and implementing a User Page Policy to help mitigate and control the massive amount of user page spam conducted by spambots that exploit wikiHow’s resources by adding spam to user and occasionally user talk pages in rapid succession.
To give you an idea how often this type of spam is attempted, there’s a filter in place to detect and prevent some of this user page spam. This filter already detects and prevents roughly 100 spammy edits per hour. Since the filter was implemented, it has helped detect over 7 million occurrences of user page spam. Here’s a sample of what’s being filtered today:
Even with this filter in place, we continue to see massive account creation and abuse by spambots. There are still often upwards of 200 or more of these spam-type edits that manage to slip through existing filters per day, and they often promote commercial products or services, and sometimes they promote explicit or illegal services.
You may have seen some of these types of edits periodically while browsing through RC Patrol.
Here’s an example of an account created by a spambot merely to promote a business:
These accounts make no meaningful contributions to the wiki, but rather the accounts are created in rapid succession by spambots because they’ve found an easy way to push their spam without any real repercussion.
Fortunately, this has not been a huge concern because these user pages never get indexed, and they’ll never be crawled by search engines and promoted through the likes of Google or other search engines. However, it can still make for a very negative experience for users on wikiHow who stumble across these user pages.
So, what am I looking for your input on?
Would you support modifying the Talk Page Policy and implementing a User Page Policy that would essentially prohibit exploiting user and user talk pages for the sole purpose of promoting commercial products and services, including illegal and illicit scams and other types of abusive material?
As part of the proposed policy, it would empower wikiHow Administrators and/or staff to promptly delete this content, block abusive spambots that engage in this behavior when detected, and consider additional revisions to filters that help detect and prevent this type of abuse.
I will also mention that the idea with these proposed changes would not
be to prevent legitimate community members from publicizing things on their user pages. The type of spam being targeted here is being conducted by accounts that only add this spam and never make a single edit on wikiHow. It’s very easy to decipher what’s a legitimate human versus spambots, and legitimate humans are still welcome to use their user page as they please.
With all this said, what are your thoughts?
