At 10:20 AM -0600 1/20/10, D A wrote:
>This is maybe common knowledge, but I just noticed that the CSS-D Wiki
>is, sadly, being overtaken by spam links. Nearly every page has a half
>dozen bad links on it. I tried cleaning up one page and will try to do
>it as I come across pages (fortunately, CSS-D Wiki still seems to be
>high on the google rankings).
D A, I hadn't realized this was happening, so thank you for
bringing it to the list's attention. I've cleaned up a couple dozen
pages but there's no way I can undo all this damage quickly, or even
alone.
I'm talking with the awesome people at Incutio (longtime hosts of
both the wiki and the main public archive) about how to deal with
this, and as an immediate measure we've set up a username/password
that's required for editing. For the moment, I'm going to keep those
largely to myself. Hopefully they won't be necessary long-term, but
for now they should stop dead any further spread of spam.
We're also talking about migrating the wiki off of TaviWiki, the
fairly obsolescent software it uses now, and onto something more
powerful and familiar, like MediaWiki. Doing so would allow a lot of
feature upgrades, like Akismet plugins and filtering outbound links
to include 'rel="nofollow"' and so on. The old URLs could be kept
cool by setting up permanent redirects as content moves over.
In that case, the migration of the pages would most likely need to
be a community effort. The Incutio folks are thinking of having a
process where someone can move a page's content over to the new wiki,
make sure it's decently formatted and properly linked in its new
home, and then set up a redirect from old to new URL. We're still
hashing the details. While we're doing that, I'd like to get an idea
of who would be willing to help with such an effort. If that's you,
please e-mail me OFF-LIST.
I'll be back with more details as they come together-- could be a
few days, could be longer-- to let everyone know what's going on with
the wiki. It's an incredibly valuable resource not just to us, but
to the whole community. It's too important to let die by either
shutting it down or surrendering to slow spammer suffocation.
Speaking of spammer suffocation, I feel obligated to close with a
brief personal note: as I said on Twitter this morning, the UK
company whose domain includes the string 'faqmymortgage' can faq off
and die.
--
Eric A. Meyer (http://meyerweb.com/eric/), List Chaperone
"CSS is much too interesting and elegant to be not taken seriously."
-- Martina Kosloff (http://mako4css.com/)
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