https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42594
--- Comment #2 from Nathan Larson <[email protected]> 2012-12-01 08:45:31 UTC --- It's a good question. There are some other variables (most notably, CAPTCHAs, spam blacklists, and other anti-spam tools) involved in how much spam a wiki gets, so I'm not sure how to get reliable data on that. I've administered wikis that had $wgNoFollowLinks set to true, and others that had it set to false. In both cases, spam tended to get out of hand until we installed Asirra and then it went down to almost zero. There's a "good citizenship" aspect of this too. There was some debate over whether wikis act as good citizens by using nofollow, and thereby discouraging spammers from targeting wikis in general; or whether they act as good citizens by not using it, so that good external links have a chance to prosper in the pageranks relative to the spam sites that are all over the Internet. I suppose it partly depends on how effective are the search engines' algorithms and reporting methods for identifying and "punishing" linkspam. Google encourages websites to consider nofollow as a potentially useful tool in their spam control arsenal, but to also try to find ways to avoid using nofollow on links it would be reasonable to trust. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569&ctx=cb&src=cb&cbid=-1ebbpwhoov99v&cbrank=2 I wonder what other methods might allow for a more nuanced approach than what is currently available with $wgNoFollowDomainExceptions, $wgNoFollowNsExceptions, etc. E.g., maybe links added in unpatrolled revisions would be nofollow, but then the nofollow would be removed after someone patrolled the page. Also, if some search engines accept spam reports, perhaps code could be written to automatically report the contents of pages that sysops delete with the "Spam" reason. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
