[This is a post from Brad, K12 OpenEd’s technical director.]
As much as we love the idea of mass (open) collaboration, there are problems inherent in any collaboration. You expect people to argue, and you expect different ideas regarding direction and approach. You really have to consider these good problems. The bad problems… Well, vandalism. Ugh.
We’ve had a rash of WikiSPAM lately. It’s obviously a targeted attack from some kind of botnet. All the posts target the same page and come from wildly different IP addresses. Also, the SPAM replaces its own SPAM over and over again. When we first noticed it was happening, there were fifty or sixty edits in a row from the SPAMbots. Each edit replaced its own SPAM with new SPAM.
What to do?
First thing, don’t get too down about it. Don’t turn off your wiki, and go home. Don’t hire investigators to track down and harm the monsters. Take a deep breath and…
Start watching the page on your wiki that shows recently changed pages. I visit this page several times a day. As soon as I see pages being replaced with SPAM, I revert the changes.
You can use the History section on a page to revert changes. Look back in the history for the newest good version of your page and restore it. Depending on your wiki (and version), you might be able to select it as the new page, or you may need to edit the page and save it as the newest version.
In our case, there was one page in particular that was being targeted. Once we restored the page, we temporarily disabled edits to that page. Generally, it’s safe to allow logged in users to still edit the page. It’s annoying that you have to basically turn off parts of your wiki for periods of time, it’s an expedient choice.
After you’ve dealt with immediate problem, start looking at technological solutions. Especially in the case of botnets, if you are having problems, others are too. This means that once a type of SPAM is identified, others can start looking for it and prevent it.
We use the MediaWiki software. It’s free and pretty well known. Also, there is an extension for fighting SPAM: SpamBlacklist. I had to upgrade our wiki to the latest version of the MediaWiki software before we could use it, but that was a good idea anyway. The nice thing about this extension is that it uses a shared database, as well as your own list of rules, for rejecting SPAM edits. One way to identify SPAM is by the URLs it inserts into your wiki. Once people see SPAM from a particular source, the URL gets added to a shared list, and then it’s blocked by all the wikis using the list. If you are having a specific problem, you can add the URL to your own private list.
You can also block IP addresses that have SPAMMED you. We do this, even though I think it’s better used against annoying individuals.
We would be very interested in hearing the ways you fight wiki SPAM.
Good luck!