FYI, update on wikiHaus efforts to fight user page spam: Step 1: Complete! Yesterday, wikiHaus engineer Scott made a technical change to our user pages, that should make the pages less appealing for spammers. It may take a few weeks, months for spammers to notice that the pages are less appealing than they once were. So don’t count on any immediate reduction in spam. Step 2 will be a mass deletion of these spam user pages. This step still requires that we can identify the pages correctly with a computer. Stay tuned! How you can help: If you see tons of user page spam coming in and suspect the same spammer is behind it, ask a volunteer “check user” to look at the IPs involved . In some cases we can just block the spammer’s IP and save everyone some grief. Here is how you contact a "check user. " http://www.wikihow.com/Contact-a-Checkuser-on-wikiHow
Ttrimm
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How will this affect those legitimate commercial users (though they are few) that we tell to put their links on their user pages, not the articles?
Omniomi
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Can you elaborate for the curious? I assumed something like setting the User: space to noindex, nofollow but I notice it’s still index, follow so I’d be interested to know what the change was.
Maybe they set a hidden form… If it is filled, than it aborts the save. Kinda like Simple Anti Spam…
system
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And if he TELLS us… then the spammers will invent a way around whatever measures are being put in place… Satisfy your curiosity via private email instead of via the forums.
How will this affect those legitimate commercial users (though they are few) that we tell to put their links on their user pages, not the articles?
^ The link I would’ve put on my userpage is blacklisted (it goes under blogger :P). Adding a link under the site thingy in Edit Profile would still be fine.
Users (including commercial users) who use the site to create, read and share information will be unaffected by the changes we are making with this round of changes. Really, if commercial users are real editors here, they won’t be treated any differently than they are today. @Omniomi
, you might notice that some user pages are actually marked noindex, rather than index. In addition, the percentage of pages marked noindex may change over time. And yes, I’m being deliberately vague on all of our changes. No need to hand spammers our playbook
Wow, I never noticed this (this discussion got hidden below others!). By the way, great work Scott and everyone at wikiHaus!
system
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Lovely. No more spam. Absolutely gorgeous. No I can freely patrol edits without hesitation.
system
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/me loves Jack and Scott (and all our wikiEngineers at the wikiHaus!) Thanks guys! The bunch patrol list is now manageable thanks to you!
