Wiki spamming and new tactics
Published by on March 10th, 2006
I’ve spent a good chunk of my initial time this morning clearing spam links from the Britcaster Wiki. It’s a chore but has to be kept up, though thankfully most of the time only one or two pages of content has been messed with.
Today however, I noticed a change in one spammer’s style. I spotted a pair of links from two particular usernames, the first one appearing to be a spammer and the second one a little while later appearing to have cleared out that spam:
Both of these were, in fact, spammers, the same spammer as it turns out, giving the impression that the first page hit had been cleaned by the second thus hopefully fooling the wiki’s admin into thinking all was now well with that page, move along now, nothing to see here. It was suspicious to see this pattern appear twice, once yesterday and once this morning (as I was clearing other spam rubbish as it happens).
Thankfully the small amount of spam in this wiki means I can and do double check anyone else’s spam clearing efforts just to be sure it has been done correctly, so this didn’t catch me out. But a very busy wiki Admin might just assume another user had already dealt with the problem. Sneaky little spammers.
