If You Build It, They Will Come - And Spam the Shit Out of Your Wiki

One of my least favorite things in the whole world is dealing with wikispam. To paraphrase from the movie "Field of Dreams", if you build it, they will come, and spam the shit out of your wiki.

Now, I'm trying to keep things simple as far as the Fractured Fairfax wiki goes. One of my favorite design principles is summed up by the acronym KISS, which besides being your older brother's favorite rock band (or now maybe your father's), stands for "Keep It Simple, Stupid". That is, don't add on a lot of shit that will overcomplicate your solution to a problem.

With this in mind, I originally started with just a bare Mediawiki installation, to which I added the ParserFunctions and Cite extensions. The former makes it easier to design templates and certain special pages for the wiki, while the latter makes it so I can add footnotes and references to the articles on Fractured Fairfax (it may be poorly written crap, but it's poorly written crap with proper attribution).

Next I added on the Google Analytics Integration stuff, which lets me look at a whole bunch of statistics which I can slice and dice in all sorts of interesting ways to figure out what parts of Fractured Fairfax people are actually reading. The idea here is that if people are reading certain types of articles, I should craft and curate similar articles to cater to my audience.

The last one was the hardest, or easiest. In its previous incarnation, the How to be Bad blog specifically made fun of the idea that someone might think advertising on that blog was a good idea. However, even though I don't expect to get rich (or even make a very good living) from Fractured Fairfax, I'm not going to just fork over money to my Web host for the joy of running a wiki. I figure a tiny little bit of advertising to help offset the minimal costs I incur isn't going to destroy Fractured Fairfax, so I added an small spot for Google to display whatever ads they think are appropriate for my audience.

So, back to wikispam. One advantage of having a new home for the Fractured Fairfax wiki was that the spammers hadn't found it yet, so I didn't have to worry about dealing with them. That golden age lasted all of about 2 days before the spammers found the site and started crapping it up with their E-shite.

Since playing Internet whack-a-mole with wikispammers is not my favorite way to pass an evening (delete crap wiki page, block user, rinse and repeat), I decided to add some measures to try and minimize their impact. One of these was adding the SpamBlacklist extension to the Wiki. So far, I've seen a little bit of improvement, but I think some fine-tuning is needed, which I'll do before I add any more.

I'm trying to keep it simple, after all.