Hi yall. I'm working on writing a new spam-fighting tool. I'm trying to learn Python to build it too. The basic concept is fairly simple, but I think it would help investigations.
If the program works as intended then it should be able to find the first version of the page to contain a particular spam-link, helping to tack down who actually added it. It should make searching pages with thousands of edits alot quicker.
It occurs to me that this might be helpful with tracking down certain types of subtle vandalism and copyvio.
Ok, here is my current working...err.. process list.
Any sugustions or other comments? --- J.S ( T/ C) 17:44, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
-- BozMo talk 19:28, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Doing some simple spread sheeting I'm able to determine how many checks (checking an old version of the page) a particular method might take. I'm going to assume the page has had 12000 edits... (Yeah, I know, that might be the extreme, but it's useful for a though-experiment).
That's my basic analysis. Each method has it's pros/cons. If the link was added once and never removed, or removed very recently (sneaky spam) then method 4 would find it the quickest and their would be no chance of error. I think that's the major scenario we deal with when a detailed investigation is called for, right? If the link was added/removed a few times but with long intervals between then method 3 would be more likely to find the very first time it was inserted, but still might hit on the wrong one. The "check every edit" or the "check every Nth edit" are the most reliable, but both can take hours to process. --- J.S ( T/ C) 21:12, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
69.22.217.141 ( talk · contribs) has been adding links to this ( http://mymom.pledgepage.org) solicitation site requesting money for his mom's surgery. Anchoress 03:29, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I was wondering about the possiblility of using DNSBLs as a preventative measure against crap like this (those spamtraps are currently empty) and other general linkspamming. There are a number of ways we might be able to do this - the questions are which blacklists and what to block (e.g. at least 25% of the change is adding external link(s))? MER-C 04:36, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
An established Wikipedia editor has not only been adding good content, but also links to a series of web sites owned by PtS plc. See ChrisNickson ( talk • contribs • page moves • block user • block log); his talk page lists the 10+ sites linked to so far, plus another 70 PtS is developing. An anonymous IP, 82.19.71.53 ( talk • contribs • page moves • block user • block log) has also added links.
There is one well-established online publication, GlobalVillageIdiot, in PtS' listings, and it was the only one I noticed that might meet WP:EL. Wikipedia has 12 links to that music review site; all were added by other editors with good reputations on Wikipedia. Most of these editors had extensive editing histories (1000s of edits). I left these links alone.
All the other links are cleaned up. -- A. B. (talk) 07:30, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I was following up on several spammers' spam trails and noticed these as needing more cleanup; I didn't have any time left:
Many other articles on individual phones are spammy too. Also, I kept seeing the same domain names over and over again.
Not as bad:
Partially cleaned up already?
-- A. B. (talk) 07:47, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
This is a pretty sneaky linkspam campain, and Vinni-Puh seems a pretty patient user - when a lot of folks begin watching, he stops for quite a while. However, he then returns and expands his linkspamming, and does it across multiple languages of WP as well. Please see [en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:Vinni-Puh&oldid=96102740 this snapshot of his talkpage] (he keeps blanking anti-spam warnings) and specifically [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:Vandalism_in_progress/Archives/2006/01&diff=34468789%20the%20old%20VIP%20entry the WP:ANI entry archived] from over a year ago. -- BACbKA 14:17, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
Vinni-Puh has also spammed other Wikipedias; here's info on the versions of the Amin Maalouf article on other Wikipedias. I am in the process of going over his contributions and accounts on these other Wikipedias and I will post that soon:
The tip-off was that I saw him adding inter-wiki links to the versions of this article in some other languages and I wondered why a dedicated spammer would make that extra little effort to seemingly improve Wikipedia for its own sake, not his. Now I know.
--
A. B.
(talk) 18:26, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
I'm out of time today. Here's what I was going to do for each language version:
As I mentioned, I've run out of time. Figuring out how to write up this inter-wiki stuff took hours.
Finally, I am worried about blacklisting all of narod.ru unless we're sure it's all spam. My impression is that it may be a big hosting service like a geocities or a yahoo.
Thanks for any help you can render. -- A. B. (talk) 20:20, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Arabic:
Bulgarian:
Czech:
German:
Greek:
Spanish:
Farsi (Persian):
French:
Galician:
Indonesian:
Italian:
Kurdish:
Hungarian:
Dutch:
Norwegian:
Polish:
Portuguese:
Romanian:
Russian:
Simple English:
Slovenian:
Swedish:
Turkish:
Chinese:
-- A. B. (talk) 19:59, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Here's what I've seen so far on this and other Wikipedias:
-- A. B. (talk) 06:29, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Narod.ru is a big Russian hosting service similar to Yahoo. The entire domain was [meta.wikimedia.org/?title=Spam_blacklist&curid=13107&diff=501199&oldid=501190 blacklisted] at our request earlier this week then soon [meta.wikimedia.org/?title=Spam_blacklist&curid=13107&diff=501348&oldid=501199 unlisted] due to m:Talk:Spam blacklist#socarchive.narod.ru major complaints about collateral damage. I have requested that just the domains above be blacklisted. -- A. B. (talk) 09:57, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
We have more than 1000 links to 1911encyclopdia.org [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Linksearch&target=%2A.1911encyclopedia.org&limit=500&offset=0] which is a scanned copy of the 1911 encyclopedia britannica for which that site claims copyright (probably invalidly but whatever). In cases where it's a real reference for an article we should use the {{1911}} template but a lot of those links are just spam, making this a bit hard to sort out even not counting the sheer scale. To really do it right we have to figure out whether each article actually contains EB text. 67.117.130.181 13:04, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
As I work through the copyvio material added by In4pharm ( talk · contribs), the editor appears to be spamming drugs-about.com. There aren't all that many links to that site, but I'm bogged down documenting the copyvio problems, so it would be helpful if someone could check who else is adding the links. JonHarder talk 02:30, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
Over the last week or so, several users (and a couple of IP addresses) have been persistently trying to link this site into mostly computer-related articles. Check out special:linksearch/popsnail.com for any new links. Is it time for the site to be added to the spam blacklist now? Users who have added links to the site include Jennyjennie09io ( talk · contribs), Katherine9976hy ( talk · contribs), Janet4363j ( talk · contribs), Lucine098ui ( talk · contribs), Joyce23424tg ( talk · contribs), GREAT0897 ( talk · contribs), Xmaswei ( talk · contribs) and NerdDFGE ( talk · contribs). IP addresses linking to the site (based in Asia) are 212.138.64.178 ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) and 222.231.50.97 ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log). Graham 87 07:25, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
As Jimbo has just started promoted his "Wikiasari" project, outbound links from WikiPedia pages might be considered worth even more than before... I'd say: prepare for a bunch of spam the coming months... -- Jdevalk 10:42, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
This article can attract some spam but is generally well-watched. The "See Also" section links to articles for bubbles in different countries, some of which are poorly monitored and frequently spammed. -- A. B. (talk) 16:31, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
User:Lesb246 is spamming every Eastern Oregon-related and many unrelated pages with the link to the Eastern Oregon State University distance education program. Well-intentioned but annoying... Katr67 00:05, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Just a heads up--there is an anon User:12.180.9.131 editing in a similar pattern to the blocked user. Katr67 16:25, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Please write a separately visible section in Wikipedia:Spam that describes the wikimedia's spam blacklist ( m:spam blacklist). Right now various bits and pieces are in several places: Wikipedia:External links, Wikipedia:Spam some useful can be found in m:talk:spam blacklist. `' mikka 01:05, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
[en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Linksearch&target=%2A.answers.google.com&limit=500&offset=0 answers.google.com] Quite a few of these, asside from the google article, these are inapropriate as EL's.. Agreed?-- Hu12 17:35, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
this article is attracting agents and representatives of change-management-toolbook.com and change-management.com, obvious Wikipedia:External_links#Advertising_and_conflicts_of_interest. hnauheimer ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) who's user page states I am mainly interested in Change Management and run one of the most frequented webpages on the subject (The Change Management Toolbook change-management-toolbook.com). Proceded to go on a link removal fit (the old strawman, If i can't have a link no one can) after citing the policy. 67.161.154.237 ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) aka Prosci ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) who stated on the talk page As the founder of the Change Management Learning Center is repedidly trying to insert his site change-management.com. I think a second or third voice on the matter may be needed. Also if others want to add this article to their watch list, as activity recently has increased.-- Hu12 16:31, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Whoa, take a look at Anti-money laundering's EL section -- Hu12 18:19, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
After seeing the warning message on Anti-money_laundering above, I modified the Template:Cleanup-spam to conform more closely with WP:EL. Please review and see if it needs improvement. Warning should include both commercial and non-commercial sites. Calltech 19:15, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Startcom ( talk · contribs) has been making solid, good-faith contributions to Wikipedia since mid-November. However, I have concerns about a significant conflict of interest because the edits all revolve around StartCom and its products. This user has been up front about noting his affiliation on the Startcom user page, as recommended by the conflict of interest guideline and this is to be commended. The recommendation to avoid editing in related articles has not been followed. There are several different issues involved here, which I will try to delineate. These cover a diversity of topics that I have insufficient experience dealing with.
Since I am running into more of this type of editing, I would like some input and suggestions about how to deal with it. I have invited user Startcom to respond here also. JonHarder talk 21:31, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
The editor of these articles has provided links to support notability. I continue to believe editing articles that one has a financial interest in is a very bad idea. ✤ JonHarder talk 22:14, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Seen while cleaning up Change Management. There are over 20 of these links:
Do those web pages meet WP:RS in terms of editorial supervision? It sort of looks like an online text book, but then again maybe it's just some sort of self-published junk.
I did not have time to see if they were campaign-spammed or just added one at a time in good faith. -- A. B. (talk) 09:49, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
I had to drop this as I was in the middle, but it looks like A. B. picked it up and finished it off. JonHarder talk 22:54, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Ohnoitsjaime suggested that I put to the floor the question of adding links to unearthtravel.com on Country Pages and City Pages. Unearth travel is a travel wiki and itinerary builder with no advertising. The reason information cannot be put straight in as encyclopedic content is that it is creative commons...an incompatible license with Wikipedia's as many know, but that does not mean the Wikipedia user should lose out on the travel information. Links have been added to a number of country/city pages within Wikipedia but have been taken down. Given that wikitravel links are being left it seems there is some sort of inconsistent system of editing with respect to this particular issue. Both sites have useful CC information that can be linked to appropriately in a Tourism Section of any External Links, so either surely they should both be there or neither?
Any thoughts? PSBennett—The preceding unsigned comment was added by PSBennett ( talk • contribs) 16:11, 29 December 2006.
Thank you for the clarification and praise. Happy New Year!
User talk:PSBennett
I looks like I set off the owner of PolyAnalyst by placing a "notability" tag in the article. The two sentence article has been expanded by an order of magnitude with lists of external sites, papers and books, perhaps to make a point. I think among all of the links that notability has been established, but probably the balance of new material isn't helpful. Is anyone willing to smoothe things over with Jfroelich ( talk · contribs)? I expect something similar will be hitting a related article, Megaputer Intelligence. JonHarder talk 23:06, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Anonymous user has been posting links repeatedly to mutliple articles with the domains www.appliedlinguisitcs.org and www.lingforum.org. The links have been repeatedly removed by me and other users but they consistently reappear. The poster did respond on one talk page - addmitting that they were using the link to gain "PR" (see: Talk:Applied_linguistics#External_link_removed) - also the content the author claims to be providing is all available from other non-commercial websites if he believes it should be linked. Now someone with an anonymous IP who posted the links noted above has posted a link to www.torquewrenches.org from the Torque wrench article. While not conclusive, it uses the same website template and similar language. All the sites are based around supplying minimum content with maxium adsense. Is there anyway to just block these urls from being repeatedly reposted? (Affected articles: DELTA (ELT), English language learning and teaching, Applied linguistics, cognitive science, JET Programme, Language education, Language school, Phonetics, Second language acquisition, Teaching English as a foreign language, and Torque wrench. (Many of the pages are cleaned-up at the moment). Nposs 02:51, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
The above claims are all highly debatable. And my comments below have unfortunately been deleted by Nposs, though they were all signed by me:
-The comment mentioned by Nposs has most likely been made by someone trying to harm the reputation of LingForum, as indicated by the fact that the IP of the fake poster belongs to a totally different country than the IP of the owners of the site, one of whom is me Linguist J 21:26, 1 January 2007 (UTC).
-The content argument is wrong, too since there is no other academic forum site that is dedicated solely to the discussion of linguistics; thus, this generalization is wrong if it includes LingForum, too - as the author accepted somewhere else. Linguist J 21:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
-The poster is not associated with LingForum. And if he/she provided links to LingForum, the above statement should be corrected since LingForum does provide lots of content and is authoritative in its area. Linguist J 21:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
-With respect to the comment about similar templates, most possibly, the template is copied/stolen, etc. I e-mailed the torque site to inquire more into this Linguist J 21:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
-With regards to Nposs' claim that all the sites are based around supplying minimum content with maxium adsense, it is clear that one cannot include LingForum to this generalization, which is another reason why this very article violates the rights of LingForum. Linguist J 21:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC) Linguist J 22:26, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
~Jane~ 70.111.246.19 ( talk · contribs)
Please do not remove other people's posts from this or from other talk pages. Why are the advertisements displayed at torquewrenches.org registered to lingforum.com? Femto 13:05, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
A couple of comments. Although I cannot connect to either www.appliedlinguistics.org/com or www.lingforum.org/com to see what they look like today, I have removed links to those sites in the past because they did not conform with our manual of style for external links. We do not accept links to forums, and it doesn't matter who contributes to the forums. As for the appliedlinguistics site, I am concerned about the comment that you have recently purchased the site. If it is not ready, then do not link it. When it is ready, we can look it to determine if it is acceptable for external links. -- Donald Albury 16:20, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi there, Again, we have nothing to do with the torque site! The same webmaster might have prepared it, or they might have directly copied one of our sites, or they might be trying to play a bad game on us. Whatever the reason is, someone is trying to violate the rights of LingForum, which we will inquire. That person might or might not be a Wikipedian. One thing is clear though; we did NOT give the links (on Wikipedia) to the LingForum even, let alone the applied linguistics site. As I said, many people became fans of the former site; so they mark it in social sites like delicious, digg, etc. even, on which we have NO control. ~Jane!
For those following this case - I've now been threatened with a lawsuit by the "LingForum Administration"( User_talk:Nposs#Comments_on_Nposs) - for what, I am not sure. I have made no comments about the lingforum site itself. It is the repeated linking of the site from multiple articles that resembles spamming. The site itself seems inoffensive, but it simply does not fit into the acceptable limits of what should be externally linked (see above comment from Donald Albury). As Femto noted above, there are some suspicious relationships between the three websites, but in the end, it is the content and quality of the sites (or their violation of external linking guidelines) that make them inappropriate and worth removing. Nposs 19:23, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
As I said, we will inquire into the torquewrenches case. However, associating our name with that site or calling us spam IS a violation of our rights. Again, we have nothing to say against people who put or remove links to our pages, but once they are called spam or associated with other sites that has nothing to do with us, then, that IS a violation of our rights,m and of course we might have to take the necessary legal steps if, of course, this case is not cleared in other non-legal ways. Somehow, someone is playing a bad game on us; this is clear! But I do not know whether this is Nposs, another Wikipedia user, or a non-Wikipedian. One last thing is that we do not know who left that comment on our behalf on Nposs' page. The presence of that comment there is also a violation of our legal rights! Just as the presence of this very article here. User:Linguist_J
I have blocked Linguist J ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log) for violating Wikipedia:No legal threats. -- Donald Albury 00:32, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Comments: (Since Linguist_J and her IP was blocked, she requested that I send this to you)
The above comments by A.B. against Linguist_J are particulary revealing, and in fact - ironically enough - show how Linguist_J was right (though A.B's original goal was to disprove Linguist_J). And this is my last entry/comment. And I will NOT come back here and try to prove anything else. And I will myself remove any links to our sites from Wikipedia that might be put by anybody who might supposedly be trying to help or trying to harm our sites' strong reputation.
My answers to the claims above, especially to those of A.B. are given below:
1. Well, I have repeatedly stated that the above comment, related to PR, made on behalf of us has NOT been made by us, which is one reason why I said the case might lead us to follow the necessary legal steps. We are obviously being accused of saying something which we have not, and a good indication of this is the fact that the IP of the fake poster belongs to a totally different country than ours.
2. And thanks for blocking me though I was right and though we were the ones whose legal rights were violated. I think this blocking case is by itself enough to show what is going wrong with respect to this very case at issue here. I will not come and comment here any more.
3. The argument related to Google backlinks is WRONG! Google updates them very rarely and shows only a portion of them though they have that info, which is a very well-known fact. This said, the best way to check them is to either do an msn backlink search or to use a backlink search site. Or just enter the url of the domain you want to search. In any case, you will not find any spam in the history of LingForum, and you will only find Linguistics-related sites that are very authoritative in the field.
4. The variety of IPs (from several universities, cities, etc.) and domains posted above (that linked to EITHER of the above-mentioned domains) just shows how many users have been interested in especially LingForum all over the world; yes, we have a lot of Turkish users, too, as well as many users from many other countries.
5. Noone says appliedlinguistics site is important; it is not ready yet. Until recently, it belonged to translators (though the domain is linguistics related), and most of the 300 something links to the site are "translation-related." And please check the links in a more appropriate way (using a link checker, or directly typing the url in Google search box).
6. I know that no matter what I say here, some Wikipedia editors/moderators will either block me again or find some IPs there of our users who added links to our site, and carefully and intentionally choose them in a way to prove their own point. This said, there is no point in my being here and trying to show how our rights have been violated! Good bye to you Wikipedia moderators and editors. Since this is your job, you have time to deal with this; I do NOT. I am an academician, and I will work on my own stuff, and will not try to prove any more how some Wikipedia moderators violated our rights by associating us with a spam site that just copied our pages (possibly using a content generator). Smart Wikipedia users/moderators/admins who will read these will already understand what went on here on the spot.
7. Most of the IPs given by A.B. belong to universities, and it seems that muliple users edited multiple articles using those IPs, not just the external links to our sites. This does not require an Einstein genious to figure out; they are universities, and multiple users use those IPs. There will, for sure, be Wikipedia visitors from those IPs, who will edit several different articles, related to linguistics or not. Thus, giving those IPs here makes absolutely no sense other than nicely proving Linguist_J's point. Indeed, A.B. also mentions this briefly saying that the poster might have had sheer interest in the two sites that A.B. gives at the end of her comments. Thanks to her for this understanding at least!
8. Also, LingForum is clearly a top-quality website (I said many times that it is linked by several authoritative linguistics sites worldwide). This being said, many people will still continue to link to us, and some people will - unfortunately - put links to Wikipedia (which I will myself try to remove so as not to be associated with any other sites to which those same users might link). If I stay here more, trying to prove my point, that will do me more bad since, then, as has already happened, some moderators will come up with some other websites that users of our site have linked to, and associate them with us. Cute Example: Let's say a user loves LingForum, and loves George Bush, too. And puts links in Wikipedia to both LingForum and Bush's personal site. Does this mean that Bush was the person who linked to us or that both LingForum and Bush's site are owned by the same person? This is absolutely RIDICILOUS. And the wrong arguments of Wikipedia moderators here are as ridicilous if not more.
Keep up good work and please deal more with real spam sites rather than dealing with two non-profit linguistics sites that have nothing to do with spam whatsoever. But it is at least good to know that Wikipedia moderators take their job seriously and are fast, though it would be better to see a bit more understanding in distinguishing a real spam site from an authioritative site which itself suffered a LOT by spammers and whose content was stolen/copied by a spam site.
Sincerely, ~Jane~ Linguaaaa 01:14, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Appliedlinguistics.com -- the entire site; see for yourself
So why would anyone even link to this site? In particular, why would any linguist not not tied to lingforum.com be linking to it? -- A. B. (talk) 17:58, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 19:32, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't think that I would call the links to ratemyteachers.com typical spam because they were probably most often added by students from the individual schools that have the links, but after looking at the website, I think that EVERY link to the website other than the RateMyTeachers article should be deleted as inappropriate. I don't have the time to do the link removals. Can it be done by Bot? Here is a list of all 56 links to the website. [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.ratemyteachers.com] Blank Verse 00:02, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Jdmalouff ( talk · contribs) added approximately 20 links to various city profiles on [www.beyonddc.com beyonddc.com] today. I left him a {{ spam}} message and he appears to have stopped for now. He's been a contributor around here on DC area articles. I was looking through the BeyondDC site and found their [beyonddc.com/faq.shtml FAQ page]. It appears that Jdmalouff is the site's "J. Daniel Malouff" presenting a conflict of interest. As expected, I just received (as I'm writing this comment up) a message from him about it, see User_talk:Metros232#Stop_removing_LEGITIMATE_external_links. He feels that I removed the links just because he did it in a high frequency tonight. I replied explaining it's a conflict of interest and pointed to the relevant policies. I'm sure I'll get a message back saying "but this is a non-profit site I'm liking to, I'm not getting anything in return for the links here, etc." so I figured I'd bring this here for outside opinions so as to assure that it doesn't appear like this is a one user crusade against his website. There are [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.beyonddc.com 6 other links] to the site as I post this and all seem decently legit ( Corridor Cities Transitway might warrant further investigation as Jdmalouff wrote that article though). Can I have some outside views? Metros232 04:22, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Is it considered spam to leave a friendly message on another User's talk page, pointing them to a blog review that discusses a new MediaWiki-based product/service that welcomes something that the Wikipedia User in question has been reprimanded for doing on Wikipedia? So as not to be vague, I am talking about a case where a User may have created a Category that is then deleted from Wikipedia, but this Category would have been welcomed at another off-Wikipedia wiki, such as in this case. I am willing to abide by the community consensus, but I don't appreciate that someone has already made this judgment and REMOVED my comments from other Users' talk pages. It's practically stalking.
Before you jump on the "Of course you are spamming, JossBuckle" bandwagon... please consider that Jimbo's Wikia project is very frequently cited as a recommended alternative to users who are building out Wikipedia in ways that are not considered helpful to the encyclopedia (e.g., with unduly detailed fancruft pages). Examples of this happening can be found here, here, and here. Before you comment that what I have done is unacceptable, ask yourself if it is not also unacceptable to promote Wikia as a preferred alternative to Wikipedia? Is Wikia the "official" external wiki worthy of spam-tolerance? Should Wikia.com be threatened with a permanent blacklist block, as has Centiare?
Please, Wikipedia community. It is getting downright embarrassing how you're enforcing certain rules while turning a blind eye to their gross violation elsewhere. Please respond here with your opinions about this concern of mine. -- JossBuckle Swami 13:54, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
JossBuckle Swami--Asside from campaigning and Canvassing for contributions, aparently now Votestacking, please cease this behavior. see [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16]-- Hu12 21:17, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
How about this, everyone? Before there's a complete witch hunt to discover where JossBuckle lives and who he dated in high school, answer this question:
If there's a Wikipedia user whose Category is headed for deletion, would it be okay to leave a message on his/her Talk page, which says the following:
I noticed that the Category you created, "Foo that are Bar", is likely headed for deletion. I understand that categories like this take quite some time to develop and flesh out, yet this particular one appears to be unwelcome at Wikipedia. I hope that you will continue your work here at Wikipedia. However, just so you know, there are also other wikis out there that might very well welcome such a Category project as yours. You might start by looking at Wikia.com, Centiare.com, or PBwiki.com. Note: no actual hyperlinks, to minimize spamminess.
Would that be considered spam? The reason I'm interested in doing this, is because Category deletionism has been rampant recently, and a lot of talented Wikipedians are having their feelings hurt. Letting them know that their industry and talent might be welcome in another place is showing some more kindness than just deleting their Category. I would like to include Centiare.com, because I was very impressed with the write-up about it that Scott Baradell offered in his blog last week. I am not like other Wikipedians who think that Wikia.com is the only external alternative wiki that should ever be mentioned in Wikipedia, because that's endorsing a severe conflict of interest that Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley have. -- JossBuckle Swami 13:45, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm not certain if this article was already discussed, but it appears to be a magnet for ELs ranging from commercial websites, blogs, forums, non-English, POV, etc. 4 pages broken into 10 categories. Even citations appear to be piggy-backed with commercial links. It gets to a point where the really good ELs simply get smothered with opinion or spam. Not sure where to start, but I'm inclined to clean out the EL section completely and put a warning up to spammers. Since this is a controversial topic, I'd like other opinions here first. Thanks! Calltech 17:10, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
There are currently 50 articles with external links to this site. Mattw13 ( talk · contribs), who is an SPA, has added most of them. Jgarbis ( talk · contribs), another SPA, has added some. I'm still looking for other accounts adding these links. Many of the links are labeled 'official'. I'm going to block the accounts, and start cleaning up the links. -- Donald Albury 17:37, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Tanned, rested and ready after a one week manadatory editing break earlier this month, 81.97.107.117 ( talk • contribs • page moves • block user • block log) is back at it again. For background, see:
I have no time to deal with this -- can the next shift handle? Thanks, -- A. B. (talk) 03:29, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
[en.wikipedia.org/?title=Information_and_Communication_Technologies_for_Development&diff=next&oldid=92716138 This edit] on a page I watch has me confused. The addition: Low cost computer guide doesn't have the arrow image indicating it's external and it's also written like a wikilink ([[Appropedia:Low cost computer guide|Low cost computer guide]]). But it is the color of an external link and if you click on it it takes you to www.appropedia.org/index.php?title=Low_cost_computer_guide. Appropedia is a Wiki run on mediawiki software but doesn't appear to be affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation. It's new to me. Has anyone seen this before? Will it work for any external site (and how?), any ideas how we would search for links that had been added in this manner? -- Siobhan Hansa 15:02, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Holy $#%&! We've got Wikimedia-wide "custom namespaces" for external links!? And they don't turn up in searches? Any distinction between internal and external sites is completely blurred. A
YouTube: namespace! On the same level with the
commons:? What do we have templates for? Separate templates for external links are evil enough. That's the most useless and dangerous "feature" ever. Are they #@&% nuts? [What are they thinking?]
Femto 16:54, 2 January 2007 (UTC), 11:57, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
I have run across jqjacobs.net links before and let them go as being relatively harmless. Yesterday a single IP added added links to 20+ articles, sometimes adding multiple entries to a single article. I have reverted all of those insertions. I would like a second opinion about removal from the remaining 100 articles. If you do some checking, yesterday's prolific spammer would often change "External links" to "External Links", change third-level E-L subsections to second level, or add a new "Placemarks" section. I suggest that any edits that fit this pattern can be removed as being from the same spammer. ✤ JonHarder talk 15:34, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
thismatter.com Looks like an adsense scrapper site (MFA). doesn't seem to have any other purpose ecept to catch page views. even the contact info for the site states Be sure to include the words no spam in the subject. If you do not include the words, the email will be deleted automatically.-- Hu12 02:56, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Follow-up: brief discussion with him on his user talk page - recognizes that they are self-links but feels he is entitled to them (which makes me somewhat less sympathetic to his case - especially since he mentions the importance of revenue from ads.) Here's the [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.thismatter.com|list of articles] that link to .thismatter.com. Of these, many contain non-neutral promotion using the same "concise article about ..." format (see: Taskbar, Criticisms_of_electoralism, Bond_(finance), Futures_contract, Mutual_fund_fees_and_expenses, Russell_Indexes, Investment_banking, Investment_banking, and Security_(finance). Nposs 19:14, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
I find the site owner's rationale for ignoring the Conflict of Interest guideline to be entirely unpersuasive. Basically, they feel like certain finance articles suck, but instead of taking the time to improve them, it would be easier to link to their own, better article, where they can be compensated with ad revenue for doing us such a big favor. Last time I checked, Wikipedia has been doing just fine with the efforts of over three million unpaid volunteers.
But even overlooking the significant COI violations, [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Linksearch&target=%2A.thismatter.com the links] also violate WP:EL's prohibition against "sites with objectionable amounts of advertising." I have begun reviewing and removing them, but would appreciate further assistance. -- Satori Son 20:37, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
The links in other articles may not have been placed there by Wcspaulding but that doesn't mean they were good faith edits. 67.76.153.37 placed quite a few and those were his/her only edits...which is definitely linkspamming. IrishGuy talk 20:57, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Was just made aware Sinned ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) is vandalizing EL sections and leaving edit summaries stating helping Hu12 remove "spam"!. Only contact with this person is removig his spam campain for powdermill-snowmobile-club.com see User talk:Sinned. Any advice, or help would be appreciated.-- Hu12 04:26, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
I wasn't aware of the specifics of Wikipedia's spam policies until Hu12 gave me a warning. I got the impression from the large number of commercial links on the articles for pages of towns/cities in New Hampshire, as well as some towns in Ontario I was looking at, that it was acceptable to add links to local recreational clubs to articles for towns/cities. -- Sinned 11:52, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Sinned ( talk · contribs) has been removing external links that are used as references. I noticed this on the Hampton Beach article. While the links did not necessarily back up the assertions to the article, inclusion of inline references should be assumed as good faith. Because editing an article to include refs can be time consuming, it may be more advisable to place a notice on an article's talk page that some of the refs may not be appropriate rather than arbitrarily removing them and leaving it to the article's regular editors to clean up the mess. Also, on first appearance looking at the contribs, this does smack as WP:POINT, but I'll assume good faith for now. — Malber ( talk • contribs) 18:13, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
]
On the English Wikipedia, and on others, spam is (obviously) becoming an increasing problem. The purpose of this essay is to propose a few ways to fight spam on a multiwiki, foundational level. While trying to keep it broad, there is some excellent specific stuff that is there that isn't here and vise versa; I'd encourage the editors here to skip over to the meta essay and add their expertise. JoeSmack Talk 00:21, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I've been reverting a lot of spam from www.aim-search.com today. For example, see [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Pornography&diff=prev&oldid=98314667 pornography], [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Sildenafil&diff=prev&oldid=98311667 Sildenafil], [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Phentermine&diff=prev&oldid=98302546 Phentermine], [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Tramadol&diff=prev&oldid=98302763 Tramadol]. As far as I can see there isn't much value in this "search eninge" beyond acting as a spam portal. Thoughts on whether this is a good candidate for the spam blacklist? Gwernol 01:55, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Many of you have probably seen this – it was first posted back in April 2006 – but blogger Peter T. Davis' first person account of Wikipedia link spamming, entitled [www.petertdavis.net/176-wikipedia-and-link-spammers-a-how-to-guide/ "'How-to' Guide for Link Spammers"], is still an interesting read. It was really being tossed around there for a while, partially reprinted as "How To Link Spam Wikipedia" both by [www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3240 Search Engine Journal] and [www.lockergnome.com/nexus/search/2006/04/10/how-to-link-spam-wikipedia/ Search Engineer], among others. And spammers have gotten even savvier since then, so we really need to be on our toes. -- Satori Son 01:59, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Time to stir the pot, but Angela makes me do it. It was interesting to see (yet again) Angela Beesley "marketing" the services of Wikia.com to the Wikipedia community, this time through the [mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l WikiEN-l mailing list] which is sponsored on Wikimedia servers that we users pay for with tax-deductible donations:
So, it's okay to "suggest" to other users a "more suitable wiki", especially if it's Wikia, which will put more Google ad revenues into Angela's pocket. Nobody else sees this as shameful? Just a few minutes later, another robotic Wikipedian responded, "Maybe there should be some way to mark the articles which are not notable for wikipedia, but are worthy to be included in internet.wikia.com. For example, one would include 'I7W' (non-notable website) as reason for deletion and a bot would monitor the deletion log and take the deleted articles marked that way and automatically post them on internet Wikia."
Jesus Christ, should we just make a "bot" that will transfer from every dollar donated to Wikimedia Foundation, one nickel into Angela's pocket, and a dime into Jimbo's? This is getting completely out of hand! -- JossBuckle Swami 03:41, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I would like an opinion on www.mymetar.com which contains four google ads per page. It is currently in a few articles including the METAR one and a template that is not being used. It provides weather for airports around the world and would be useful in airport articles. It's almost impossible to link to the individual weather station using the countries weather service. I would like to see the template used but I'm too close to the subject to see if its spam or not. Thanks. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 12:46, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Plbman (
talk ·
contribs ·
deleted contribs ·
nuke contribs ·
logs ·
filter log ·
block user ·
block log)
repositories.cdlib.org
I guess "working for the public good' include spamming hundreds of links.
User_talk:FisherQueen#Regarding_External_Link_I_added_to_an_online_book_on_the_historical_status_of_the_Klamath_River_salmon_fishery and
User_talk:Plbman#Reply_to_your_request
--
Hu12 02:27, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam/2006 Archive Dec#“powered by EJRS.com”. These links [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Ejrs started returning] today. -- A. B. (talk) 05:56, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
It's a fairly minor issue, but I've been dueling with anonymous SPA's for over four months trying to keep the Jerky (food) article free of spam links. The latest sockpuppet is 65.102.75.12 ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log), and their first edit was revert substituting a decent NASA inline citation with a link to a commercial website that sells beef jerky. If one or two of you could stick it on your watchlist I would really appreciate the help. Thanks, Satori Son 17:43, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
1911encyclopedia.org 1151 links & owned by LoveToKnow [www.1911encyclopedia.org/LoveToKnow_1911:About About LoveToKnow]
lovetoknow.com 38 links & owned by LoveToKnow [www.lovetoknow.com/about-lovetoknow.htm About LoveToKnow]
britannica.com holly cow! I stopped countng after 46 thousand links [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Linksearch&limit=500&offset=46500&target=%2A.britannica.com]
thecanadianencyclopedia.com 811 links Canadian Encyclopedia
I'm sure others have see these. I don't se a reason why Wikipedia should be external linking to other duplicate wikis. is there a policy specific to this? I'm inclined to remove them all.-- Hu12 06:31, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
Please take a look at the links in this article: several of them are commercial, but other editors keep restoring them to the article when I remove them, calling the removal vandalism. Thanks. A Ramachandran 15:15, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
Promotional site for the dancer Medha Hari:
Can others look at these and see if they should be deleted? I think they probably should, but additional neutral opinions and help would be welcome. Thanks, -- A. B. (talk) 13:32, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
the external links section of Net_neutrality needs a cleaning badly. i'm afraid i haven't been following the issue, so I am of less help as it is full of "papers" and "experts" etc. (notice the quotes). JoeSmack Talk 17:23, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
One to watch User:Wrathoffoamy is persistent in trying to advertise his/her business in Origami. I've gotta quit for tonight... Thanks. Pollinator 07:51, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Stumbled on this when Kkong ( talk · contribs · logs · block log) posted a link to an article I watch. Turns out all his edits aare to promote these websites:
These are wikis with a low number of users so inappropriate as external links even if they weren't being spammed.
They are all registered to the same person and all use the same google ad client number (and they are all plastered in google ads): pub-0064587396664963
Other IPs occassionally post a batch of links:
More detail can be found at: User:SiobhanHansa/Checks#lifestylewiki.com_airline-wiki.com_chinese-wiki.com
That seems to be it from the trail I have. I would recommend to the blacklist but I haven't had much luck with the recommendations I've made so I think I'm unclear on the guidelines. Other opinions? -- Siobhan Hansa 18:25, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Ragnarev ( talk · contribs) has been slowly been adding links to his own sites over the past several months: esbanquethallga.com, rayvan.net (1 link remaining), ameritech-elevator.com, lees-estate.com (1 link remaining), warspawn.com (1 link remaining) and ragnarev.com. A whois search reveal they are all registered to the same person. The links have mostly been removed by alert editors; unfortunately no one has yet warned him.
Office complex and Banquet hall were created solely as a vehicle for link spam. The articles are not that great. Is there something they can be redirected to?
Today we learned Ragnarev has a [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Talk:Internet_cafe&curid=1009877&diff=99181567&oldid=97439990 right to link to his own site]. We need a creative warning for this spam-only account! ✤ JonHarder talk 23:28, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
This site is [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.project80s.com spammed all over]. The site itself has pretty much no content. Just a cast list for shows and a brief blurb, often times taken from Wikipedia itself. It has advertising all over the place which appears to be its reason for existing. It is going to take me a while to pull all these links out of articles. Anyone want to assist? IrishGuy talk 00:03, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Not sure about this one since I don't see the immediate benefit to the spammer - maybe just driving up page hits. The action is very spammy ([en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.lifeinneurosurgery.com list]): the user has added multiple links to the website from multiple articles even including the link in See Also sections. The content of the pages linked is very thin, not really worth linking (even if it didn't violate WP:COI). With the bad experiences had by well meaning editors, I thought I'd draw your attention to it and get some feedback before taking action. Nposs 02:21, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
He's back as User:Neurosurgery - Special:Contributions/Neurosurgery (only one link so far.)
Seen while cleaning up other links:
Take the Muskellunge article (about a fish). Here's the link that was there:
Tell me how this advances any readers understanding of muskies, their biology or how you catch them. I submit that even the underwater-dock-lights spammer's stuff is more useful to the reader: underwater-dock-lights.com (That is not an endorsement of underwater-dock-lights, however). -- A. B. (talk) 02:30, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I added a new "Removal how-to" section on the main project page. This is intended to be a basic step-by-step guide for beginners. Each step increases in complexity; an editor can choose to stop anywhere in the progression. My idea is to make it as basic as possible for someone who is interested in helping but isn't sure of the process. How can it be improved? I think changes that simplify would be better than trying to add every possible nuance and special case.
I think the lead of the main page could be trimmed or parts of it moved farther down. The new material duplicates material that follows. This can be cleaned up once there is a consensus that the how-to is appropriate and stable. ✤ JonHarder talk 02:42, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
This is an ongoing problem what no one seems to be willing to either intervene in or investigate. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=libsyn.com&fulltext=Search Libsyn.com] in particular seems to be using it's 300+ imbedded links throughout Wikpedia as it's most effective free advertising source, as well as [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=www.otrsite.com&fulltext=Search www.otrsite.com] and [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=www.freeotrshows.com&fulltext=Search www.freeotrshows.com]. I realize this is only 400+ articles out of hundreds of thousands, but they're pretty representative of the further problem. The fact that no one seems to be responding to any of these larger scale link spam abuses over the past 9 months smacks of either some sort of 'convenient' overlooking of the problem, or perhaps even worse, no effective guidelines for resolving link spam abuse within Wikipedia. Any further assistance or more effective strategies or guidelines--including kicking this problem up the Wikipedia hierarchy if necessary--would be greatly appreciated. 76.170.239.56 21:23, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
While on the subject of deciding, I found another website offering "free" downloads of OTR shows that should be considered as well www.radiolovers.com ([en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.radiolovers.com%2F *.radiolovers.com]). It seems these websites believe that the copyright has expired on the shows. At the same time both radiolovers and freeotrshows.com feature ads. Nposs 22:27, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I have been going back and forth between another company who is up-front about wanting to expand their article with factual information. To me the conflict of interest guideline is clear: one should not edit articles related to their organization, but should feel free to make suggestions on the talk page. The Arbitration Committee consistently rules against those who ignore this guideline (they tend to get long blocks or bans in conflict situations). Can these conflict of interest edits be continually reverted as we do spam and vandalism? If so, what incentive does an employee have to be transparent about who they represent and make suggestion only on the talk page, supply useful images, etc? Is it preferable to allow some known COI editing over the usual sneaky stuff we deal with every day?
My current case deals with Extreme Networks, their corporate IP 207.179.9.4 ( talk · contribs) (sometimes used by Jennifer) and another employee Edchao ( talk · contribs). Our interactions have always been professional, respectful and courteous. What follows is copy our discussion from my talk page plus my latest response. I will encourage them to follow up here also. Any suggestions would be helpful, particularly about my conclusion below that their recent addition with many product links needs to be reverted again. ✤ JonHarder talk 03:09, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi, I just noticed that someone had deleted the entries that I made yesterday regarding information about Extreme Networks. Is there some rules that I violated? Please let me know so I came make the proper edits to comply.
Thanks, Ed — Preceding unsigned comment added by Edchao ( talk • contribs) 19:40, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Please take a look at the links in this article: several of them are commercial, but Marceo keeps restoring them to the article when I remove them, saying they address shortcomings in the article. Thanks. A Ramachandran 05:30, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
seems JumpTV has turned into a directory/ channel list. Not sure if somone wants to have a look.-- Hu12 05:38, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
The JumpTV article has turned into a link repository that also contains an excess of advertising language. Concerns have already been raised on the talk page, where I have commented as well, so I have removed the entire "Channel list" section. -- Satori Son 20:59, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Seen while catching up on my reading last night:[forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=210074&highlight=Wikipedia]
There are numerous links to web sites affiliated with this organization and its webmaster.[forums.digitalpoint.com/member.php?u=50538] [forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=2041351&postcount=16]
"NICOclub's Nissan forums and Infiniti forums and all affiliated sites are the property of HDS Holdings, LLC. They are independent publications and are not affiliated with or endorsed by Nissan Motor Company or Nissan North America."
Domains involved (probably not a complete list):
Affiliate sites not linked:
Editors adding these links (probably not a complete list)
I doubt I'll have time to clean these up and warn people. Can I leave this to the next shift? Thanks, -- A. B. (talk) 00:15, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Site:
Accounts[forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=2043158&postcount=24] [forums.digitalpoint.com/member.php?u=46310] adding these links:
-- A. B. (talk) 00:45, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
From my morning reading (registration required/discretion advised)[www.syndk8.net/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=7543] [www.syndk8.net/forum/index.php/topic,3970.msg82076.html#msg82076]
Sites linked:
Accounts involved:
-- A. B. (talk) 02:15, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
-- A. B. (talk) 05:21, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
-- A. B. (talk) 05:49, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
-- A. B. (talk) 06:34, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Today's meltdown [en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=prev&oldid=99734005],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99734055&oldid=99734005],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99734106&oldid=99734055],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99734291&oldid=99734106],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99735732&oldid=99734291],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99735953&oldid=99735732],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99736054&oldid=99735953],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99737064&oldid=99736054],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99737100&oldid=99737064] of a spammer who finally read his warnings:
... leads to an observation that we have a number of articles dealing with this topic. Some are redundant, some are well-maintained and some are spam-bait. I don't have time to go over this stuff, but I did compile a list of articles:
The British certification articles seem to be better policed and more encyclopedic.
If you get the chance, please put these on your watchlists and consider cleaning them up (both spam and POV). -- A. B. (talk) 14:56, 10 January 2007 (UTC) (Status updated -- A. B. (talk) 18:18, 11 January 2007 (UTC))
User:208.100.136.104 spammed several articles with a link to the quasi-governmental (?) Central Oregon Visitors Association. A while back someone spammed every city in Lane County, Oregon with a similar link to that county's visitors bureau and I removed them all except the one in the actual county article. For some reason I'm having trouble deciding if I should nuke this Central Oregon link as well. I think I'm much too relaxed after taking a nice long wikibreak, so if someone else could take a look I'd appreciate it. Thanks! Katr67 21:40, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks everyone. I guess I got tired of being the heavy--it's good to get some backup in case the spammer argues. As wonderful as our fine state is, I really wish the spammers would stop trying to get people to come here--this kind of thing happens far too often. Katr67 03:43, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Would this and this bu User:Jrnetwork count as some sort of this an elaborate spam attempt? -- Peta 07:00, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi, I've had this request from the owner of these sites. I'm not sure how I ought to respond. I'm loath to take away the resource I have for ensuring these links do not get spammed again. But I also don't want to cause difficulties for a site that has mended it's ways - or cause unnecessary drama by being obstinate when there's an easy way to deal with it. Has anyone addressed this before? -- Siobhan Hansa 19:49, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
On a hunch (as A. B. has been suggesting) I checked on a minor spammer and found him to be a bigger problem on the French version. However, what interested me more was a sentence in the French warning template that rings true and perhaps we should open for discussion for inclusion in our templates and applicable guidelines. It says something like:
Francophones will have to correct me and suggest the best word to use at the end of the sentence. I like the idea of steering people away from adding only links to articles. Most of the time it is a sure tip-off of a spammer. We may as well just come out and say what we are thinking. Thoughts? ✤ JonHarder talk 23:25, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
OK, suppose we add these sentences to the respective templates:
I will propose it at Template talk:Spam and see what other responses there might be. ✤ JonHarder talk 02:09, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
the external links section of U.S._Route_66 needs cleaning. JoeSmack Talk 03:56, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
adsense account pub-9291737033108347, heres the list (I'm sure there is more).
-- Hu12 07:17, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
More .in spam for the record (pub-5012027703930414):
coimbatore.net.in bareilly.in bhatpara.in bhiwandi.in bijapur.in faridabad.net.in indore.net.in jabalpur.net.in ludhiana.net.in mirabhayander.co.in Nanded.co.in patna.net.in pimpri.in saharanpur.co.in Thiruvananthapuram.co.in varanasi.net.in Visakhapatnam.net.in dengue.in rbi.in ioi.in inforum.in Nposs 18:40, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
All the 3500 links have gone now anyway. Template spamming was done yesterday so well spotted. -- BozMo talk 11:06, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for cleaning that up. The previous event was [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive146#Amazon_affiliate_spam here]. I will try and get the Russian sites blacklisted at meta, and I suspect the spammer was using proxies to get around the range block - I will see if we can get them blocked. The backlinks to the astore.amazon.com domain need to be closely watched, and I say again, I don't think they have any place here.
I am not sure how to prevent this occurring again. What we need is a list of templates with external links. Another option is semi-protection for stub templates. -- zzuuzz (talk) 00:34, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Just seen at m:Talk:Spam blacklist#wichm sites -- spammer hitting across multiple language versions:
Assuming he gets blacklisted, we still need to go back and delete those links or else folks will have trouble editing the various articles. I'm away for a while, so count me out. -- A. B. (talk) 14:13, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Well, I couldn't delete the Subud one because another link on the page is already BL blocking edits. How can I find which? -- BozMo talk 14:42, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Already got a protest because the link has genuine content on it. However the content seems to have been ripped off from www.caic.org.au/general/psymove.htm . -- BozMo talk 14:54, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
However some of the content appears to be unique original and of some value: e.g. www.xs4(broken so I can save the page)all.nl/~wichm/myth.html . Hmm. Not an obvious blacklist one to me. -- BozMo talk 15:01, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Contributions consist soley of spamming articles with citations from these "related" sites.
Mergneed (
talk ·
contribs ·
deleted contribs ·
nuke contribs ·
logs ·
filter log ·
block user ·
block log)
Adsense pub-4706226669145133
--
Hu12 14:29, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
All sites are registered to Touch Group Plc
Advanced Web search optimisation techniques [www.touchgroupplc.com/dyncat.cfm?catid=537]
-- Hu12 01:10, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
see Wikipedia:Requests_for_checkuser/Case/Sselvakumar -- BozMo talk 22:12, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
The combination of Aliweb, Talk:Aliweb, and User:Aliweb ( talk) ( contribs) defy WP:OWN and WP:COI policies and fit Wikipedia:Spam#Advertisements masquerading as articles like a glove.
I'm uninvolved, merely taken a look at the situation once in awhile since mid-December. I'm too new a registrant (three months) to feel easy about slapping on the {{db-spam}}, and the attitude and persistent reversions of the self-appointed 'owner' lead me to expect he'll remove the tag a lot faster than he'll add a {{hangon}}. And, too, dropping it into CAT:SPEEDY & CAT:SPAM may simply delay a real WP:AFD. Please advise. Athænara ✉ 12:05, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
I posted it on Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard with the section heading "[[Aliweb]] {{coi-links|Aliweb}}" as is standard there. At least six anonymous IPs (employee(s) and/or owner(s) of a commercial website); diffs/contribs dissected. Athænara ✉ 13:26, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
"A wildcard may be used, at the start of the name only, for example "*.wikipedia.org". "
AFAIK, no. -- BozMo talk 14:18, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Anyone remember this discussion (Not so much spam as promotion) ? Anyway its back with category pages see: Category:Woodstock Category:Woodstock (1969) Performers etc etc. -- BozMo talk 14:18, 15 January 2007 (UTC) mainly User:Neanderthalprimadonna and user:PAK_Man. We now have a page per year see Woodstock '94 etc. Hmm... -- BozMo talk 14:22, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
I recently came across this editor, and wondered if his/her multiple insertions of the same link across articles would qualify as spam. The link itself is not commercial, AFAICT, but the articles linked to provide little extra info. Thoughts? IronDuke 16:28, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
IP addresses continue to add commercial linkspam to truffle articles, especially links to PlantationSystems.com in Tuber (genus). Truffles are a very high profit niche in both online sales and CPC advertising. Sinned 18:27, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
User appears to have placed 83 links to her site. See [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.katinkahesselink.net]. The user is clearly Katrina Hesse. She states that the site is hers on her user page. A Ramachandran 22:51, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
So now there is a rv war going on between Wjhonson and some other editors. Wjhonson is suggesting that editors need to justify every link removal on the article talk page. This seems like a bad precedent. The burden should be on the person who has provided the link. Here are the problems: 1) The user added many of the links herself - WP:COI 2) The user has admitted that she makes a portion of her income from the advertising on her website. Actually, to me, this on its own wouldn't necessarily mean the links should be removed - especially since some of the links provide good additional content and enrich the article. The problem is 3) There are way too many links to her website. Sometimes two or more on a single article. That (to me) makes it linkspam. A selective reduction of these links and a conversation with the user about WP:COI is definitely appropriate. Nposs 20:33, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Both sites are exactly the same and both appear to be complete ripoffs of britannica.com. Then I looked closer... In Henri La Fontaine nobel-winners.com was used as a source.... in 2003.[en.wikipedia.org/?title=Henri_La_Fontaine&diff=1461838&oldid=1461834] nobel-winners.com has a note that all content is released under GFDL... Not I gotta think again... it is possible that britannica.com ripped them off? If someone knows more about this, advise would be appreciated. --- J.S ( T/ C/ WRE) 03:14, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Mistook him for a vandal at first, but it appears to be an author using WP to promote his website and books. I tried to warn him about WP:COI, but he has subsequently created a page about himself ( Andras_M._Nagy) that serves only to list his books. Not exactly sure how to handle the situation. Suggestions? (Some of the links he has added to his own website contain content that might be worth linking - so I haven't deleted all of them.) Nposs 20:02, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the help everybody. Nposs 00:23, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Wisdomking (
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Adsense pub-6534719876029376
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I thought this amusing--
Hu12 23:13, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Hey, I'm not sure how to proceed, or rather, proceed further. For some time, someone has been adding to the Anchored Cross article "see also Anchored Cross (band)", a myspace page.
I'll start from the beginning; I first started clearing out the neo-classical metal list, removing red links and spam, and others not even related to it. There was one myspace linkspam; of course, an anonymous user wrote an insult on my talk page, and vandalised my page.
They then added the link on the Anchored Cross article. Since the anonymous user seemed determined, I changed it from an external link, to a red wiki link. Another user then removed the link altogether, which I agree with. The page has never been made, and I doubt it would pass notability to be included regardless.
However, for a while now, an anonymous user has readded it over and over again. If you check the page's history, you can see it's been going on since the end of November. Given the constant spam by a similar IP address, and obviously never listening, I am unsure how to proceed.
I'm rather annoyed, and would rather not have that link on Wikipedia even for a minute until someone removes it, however I don't believe that's feasible. What can I do? I'm not new to Wikipedia, but all I've ever done is edit articles, never done anything more, so I don't know what to do. Any help please? --Dayn 07:18, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
The Long Tail appears to be a useful article, and many of us have heard of the general idea, but its 'External links' section is filling up with cruft. I recently deleted a slide presentation from a search-engine optimization company [en.wikipedia.org/?title=The_Long_Tail&diff=prev&oldid=101250141] and got this response on my User_talk:
Does anyone have general advice on how to protect the page? I watch RSS (file format) and that page has an enthusiastic crew of spam-deleters, but The Long Tail seems bereft of a protective community. Any advice? EdJohnston 22:43, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Professorgupta (
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Adsense pub-3279714273926761
These are trickier because they contain actual player stats not on WP: anyone got an alternative source? -- BozMo talk 10:23, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
done -- BozMo talk 10:23, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
done -- BozMo talk 10:23, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
done by someone -- BozMo talk 10:45, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
done plus/or AFDed the linkbait articles these hung off
Clear - looks like this was cleaned up. --- J.S ( T/ C/ WRE) 17:04, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
No doubt this is the future of spam. citations and reference are being abused constantly. By all accounts the edits, and edit summaries seemmed legit, however on closer examination it was spamming on a huge scale. this is only one persons contribs, can't even begin to speculate how much more from this publisher is still out there. Now for the cleanup-- Hu12 23:00, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
The circle widens: I was surprised that many of the links above were registered by a single user in the Whois information. Well, that person is also the head of [www.seoforsports.com/contact.html SEO for sports], the organization behind the sports link spamming SEO operation. Blacklist 'em. Nposs 04:47, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
List of virtually contentless artciles added by User:Professorgupta featuring links to the user's websites or inter-wiki links to articles with links to websites:
those four I found and AfDed because realising you had listed them-- BozMo talk 10:47, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
I have AfDed the above. The below someone else can do. -- BozMo talk 11:15, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Most of these seem like good candidates for AfD. Nposs 05:34, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
We don't delete articles simply because of who started them. We delete articles for being unverifiable, for being original research, or for not satisfying our relevant notability criteria. Please don't nominate articles for deletion simply because a particular editor started them. Nominate them only if they contravene our policies. Bad articles on notable subjects should be cleaned up, not deleted. AFD is not the only tool in the toolbox. Uncle G 11:55, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Careful please! Cleaning up I established that crazysportsfan.com was the only listed source for player stats and people will complain. Can we find an alternative or remove that one from the blacklist??--
BozMo
talk 19:16, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Another two sites on WP which cross link with the above are onlypunjab.com and icudatingcams.com. I will have a quick look at who added the links to them when I have some time -- BozMo talk 20:49, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Does anyone have some insight into this situation:
I just finished going through and double-checking all of the link searches in the last talk archive, and it looks like these spam links have flared up again:
I am not sure the digital dessert ones were ever taken out. I have removed all bar two of them but most seem to have been there continually since Oct 2005 when a few IPs put them in (none of whom were warned: doesn't seem much point now they've been cold for 18 months e.g. Special:Contributions/66.146.62.152 Special:Contributions/66.146.62.14 Special:Contributions/66.146.62.15 Special:Contributions/66.146.62.11 (link diverts to digital-dessert) Special:Contributions/66.146.62.16 (july 2006 to aeve.com, an affiliate)
--
BozMo
talk 09:25, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Add also affiliated site by the same spammers (which I have cleaned up for now) [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.mojavedesert.net mojavedesert.net]
Otherwise, our cleanup from last month looks pretty good. If anyone has time to help me remove these again, it would be greatly appreciated. -- Satori Son 17:24, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Some of you may already know [www.seoworldchampionship.com/contestrules.asp about this]. I've just started to see the first links to roll in [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Greenhouse_gas_inventory&diff=101669011&oldid=91785528] [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Awareness&diff=101691321&oldid=101671692] [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Awareness&diff=101529468&oldid=101441603]. Perhaps there is more I haven't found. I won't repeat the secret phrase here, but is there any way to guard against this type of vandalism? The contest lasts until May 1. I know the contest is not new. Are there lessons learned from past years? Nposs 08:19, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
thought I'd post this before its deleted Globalwarming awareness2007, we are certainly a target-- Hu12 00:31, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
-- Hu12 03:15, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
I have a partial list of domains involved in this contest on my user subpage at User:A. B./Sandbox10. Since this WikiProject Spam talk page was semi-protected a little earlier today, contestants' vandalism has shifted to that user subpage, culminating in the page just being blanked.[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User:A._B./Sandbox10&curid=9012982&action=history] Those IPs are probably worth evaluating as potential sources of further mischief unless they're dial-up modems. The ones I checked out were mostly DSL. There might also be an open proxy or two -- always worth bolcking. Also, the user contributions may indicate some additional domains being spammed.
Until the nofollow decision sinks in, I think we'll also see some Joe jobs -- highly visible, provocative spamming of one competitor's domain ... by another competitor hoping to get the first guy in trouble. My personal attitude is, that's OK, bring 'em on. None of these links belong here. Given the nature of all these links, I'm not going to lay awake at night worrying if some globalwarmingawareness2007 domain really "deserved" to be blacklisted or not.
I encourage admins to take advantage of WP:IAR in their handling of all of this. I don't think we need to go through a 5-warning sequence to establish that these people may not be editing in good faith.
Enjoy the show. I'll revert my user page so it can be attacked some more if you want; I don't mind it being used as a honeypot. It may be worthwhile to just put it on a watchlist and keep reverting it for the information it gives us. You don't have to semi-protect it; my versions are always available from the page history. -- A. B. (talk) 20:00, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure what all Globalwarming Awareness2007 ( talk · contribs) has been doing because I think some edits have been deleted, including the main user page, and not available in the contribs. What is going on with the last two contribs though?[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:Globalwarming_Awareness2007&diff=prev&oldid=103902802][en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:Globalwarming_Awareness2007&diff=prev&oldid=103903163] He appears to still be gaming the system. ✤ JonHarder talk 21:30, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
The template Template:NoMoreLinks ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been proposed for deletion. See Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2007 January 19 to help reach a consensus on what to do. Mieciu K 14:00, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Anyone had a look at technorati.com for a while? I know it has some legit stuff but there are a lot of links from it to spammers crowing about spambaiting WP etc and it might be worth going through all the techy links to pages on it [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.technorati.com] shows 164 links but many are to non mainspace pages. -- BozMo talk 15:16, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
AJackl, not sure what to make of them, is he/she promoting something?-- Hu12 17:28, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Ok, there is a short list of some of the links this person has linked to. Every website seems to be independent entities. It appears to me that this user edits education related articles... more specifically Landmark Education related articles.
It doesnt appear to me that this user is acting in bad faith... Perhapse misguided, but not in bad faith. --- J.S ( T/ C/ WRE) 18:12, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Recently, I decided to make a program that would parse the logs from the linkwatcher bot in #wikipedia-spam on freenode and dump the logs to my userspace. Here are today's, and the archive goes back to around 7:00 PM UTC January 4, 2007.
What do you think? Veinor (talk to me) 21:46, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
following User:BozMo's lead on Special:Contributions/Zbd, how do we feel about [banglapedia.search.com.bd banglapedia.search.com.bd]? here is the web link search: [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.banglapedia.search.com.bd]. does this meet WP:RS (authoritative, verifiable)? it has some 600 links across bio articles, but it is a wiki with a long list of academic contributors (although i've certainly never heard of the site or the people). opinions? JoeSmack Talk 00:26, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
I went ahead and archived a bunch of this page... it was over 300 Kb of data! If there is anything that was still current, that I did by mistake, just copy it back out of the archive. ( here) Cheers! —— Eagle 101 ( Need help?) 00:28, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
Personally I find it hard to find things in the archives and whether they exist there. Does anyone else think that we should change to some type of AfD type structure where we archive each suspect group of sites on a subpage of the main page and have a transcluded list here of the currently active ones?
Apart from logic and ease there is a slightly odd other motive, which perhaps I shouldn't mention...it might also make it quicker to get some of the community here to the level of edits on Wikipedia which some people think is needed for a Sysop (as I am just finding out... not sure why)... as AB kindly just pointed out "... include Wikipedia Talk space since that's where most WikiProject Spam activity occurs (compare WP:WPSPAM vs. WT:WPSPAM -- I have no idea why it's that way.)" We can also close blacklist or perm block cases to clean things up. -- BozMo talk 10:15, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
At Jimbo Wales' directive, all external links within the English language Wikipedia are now coded "nofollow" -- this should help cut spamming immensely once word gets out in the SEO community.
This was mentioned in the discussion Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Globalwarming awareness2007/SEO world championship -- expect a spam onslaught.
You can check this out for yourself by having your browser display the source code (typically a menu bar command such as "View source code", "Source", or "Page source"); here's an example from the Bacteria article:
The MediaWiki software does this automatically when converting wiki-code to html to send to browsers. -- A. B. (talk) 15:37, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
I would like to point out that this doesn't mater, google gets to decide if they run this site with no follow or not. It would be trivial for google to add a line of code that says to follow wikipedia links regardless of nofollow, just as they may very well have been nofollowing our site for a while now. Google (and the other search engines) can do whatever they want with our site regardless of what we have codded in there. Just given the huge size of wikipedia alone, I can guarantee all of the major search engines have had custom ways of dealing with anything that comes out of this url. In all honesty this is out of our hands at this point. -- T- rex 17:36, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
It does little to control spam since 1) many spammers are too dumb to know it is turned on, 2) it takes a second to add a link so the traffic is worth the bother, 3) it might be turned off in the future so getting links in now when it is off will seem less spammy, and they will get a benefit in the future, 4) many spammers are dumb, did I mention that one? 2005 01:30, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
Very distressing! Wikipedia is one of the most legitimate forms of "link voting" to exist on the net. Any spammer can put up multiple web pages with links to wherever they want, but when a link survives for a significant amount of time on Wikipedia it actually means something. Wikipedia provides real value to the net in the way it affects search engine rankings. I hate this new policy and fervently hope we remove nofollow from Wikipedia links. Cos 03:51, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Can MediaWiki be arm-twisted to add the attribute in question only to the links contained in recent (for a certain definition of recent) edits? Once a link is part of the page long enough and survives enough edits by others, it is deemed "verified" and the attribute is not generated for it... пан Бостон-Київський 21:21, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Some effects of nofollow :) :
(1) Google will cache significantly fewer pages from mainspace. Hard to tell of course because the cache goes up and down with the cycle but there was a huge fall in google caching WP talk pages in May and there is a view that the "simplify dataset" part of Google's cycle (when it drops a load of "trivial" pages) is much more likely to drop pages with no external links.
(2) No noticable reduction in spam: still enough gains from actual traffic, links on mirrors and anchor text (which is probably still considered relevant even if nofollowed) and enough stupid spammers to make not noticable reduction.
(3) Editors and spammers are much more inclined to argue endlessly about spammy links claiming that as there is nofollow there is no downside in allowing them. Several Wikispam team members turn to drink (anyone for a sweepstake of who?), because of this and upset by being marked "must try harder" by Jimbo.
(4)Downward effect on WP growth curve with switch of traffic to static mirrors without nofollow (relief to WMF I suppose). Easy to test the later as I have an old advert-free (highly compliant) static mirror which gets about 20,000 Unique IPs a day. I reckon it will go up to 30,000 over about three months.
(6) Encyclopedia Britannica opens champagne.
(7) A litigant cites Jimbo's intervention as proof that the Foundation controls editorial content on WP and is therefore liable for it.
-- BozMo talk 21:13, 20 January 2007 (UTC).
comments and counter predictions
(1) They better, some of the stuff is junk.
(2) Not immediately, but over time. It will also not much reduce visible spam to articles (where the word "spam" is not appropriate anyway, because a lot of the spam is just "inappropriate" or not relevant enough to keep it). It will reduce a lot of the hidden spam that flies under the radar and is the stuff that "sticks" and making a mass spamming of the site all worthwhile. Remember, a link to a spammer site from an AUTHORITARIAN DOMAIN is much more worth if no human sees it, but the SE, because the SE give credit to it, humans would remove it.
(3) It's good to force some discussion that does not start with the argument that its only about the ranking. Some relevant resources were sometimes dismissed in the past because of this misconception which is a loss for wikipedia.
(4) Explain the thing a bit more. Why are the mirrors not ending up with NOFOLLOW in the links? They should have a "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW" in the Meta Tags for the start anyway, because it is obviously duplicate content that search engines should not pick up to begin with.
(5) Argument against it. NO FOLLOW on all links removes prejudices from the links that where included or excluded for the wrong reason. All links are NOW EQUAL and unbiased. Search engines have to fix their system and figure out which links are relevant and which not. I hope that other authority sites will follow, because Search Engines will be forced to come up with better solutions that this NO FOLLOW crap that added more mistrust to the Internet community than anything. Too much links with NO FOLLOW should be without it and a lot more links without it should have it. Since this does not going to work, set them all to the same. Humans will be able to tell the difference in most cases and don't care about hidden attributes. It's not our job to patch somebody else's broken algorithms.
(6) And maybe spammed to bits.. oh no.. they are not allowing the user to interact with them. Maybe we should do the same with Wikipedia... ahem... no.. let them drink and suffer from the hangover :)
(7) Response: No, Wikipedia decided not to continue to play the search engine's games that encourages mistrust between people, communities and sites created by the unintended abuse of the NOFOLLOW attribute by the SE to patch up some holes in a broken system they call ranking algorithm.
This will not play out within a few weeks, but months if not years, but less than 2 years IMO. -- roy<sac> Talk! .oOo. 10:42, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Worth keeping an eye on:
You see some good faith requests from neutral editors as well some other requests appealing the occasional big mistake. Then you see some of our old friends, usually with wonderful stories of their own self-reform or else some wrongdoing by a "rogue admin".[meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist#Middlesell][meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist/Archives/2007/01#I_hope_this_is_the_right_place][meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist#www.animals-pictures-dictionary.com][meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist#Sledtv.org]
Some times you even get a few leads from an IP or user name on Meta:
and similarly:
Given the number of links cleaned up, perhaps really not worth the 10 minutes I spent on it, but sort of satisfying just the same. -- A. B. (talk) 17:52, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
In the past couple of days I have noticed cases of double-linking to a site. In general the entry is like X/Y at X. My initial reaction is that this is unnecessarily promotional of the site. Since this pattern repeats over multiple articles, it is likely a small set of editors adding the links, but I haven't checked. A couple of examples to evaluate:
Thoughts? ✤ JonHarder talk 18:00, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
[www.example.com/example.php Example] at
Example.com
. external link followed by internal link. If no internal link exists, then we just link to it once. ---
J.S (
T/
C/
WRE) 18:22, 20 January 2007 (UTC)Sometimes this might be a legitimate thing by an editor who wishes to avoid deeplinking into a rapidly changing site (MS comes to mind), or into a site which asks not to deep-link (such as WoS) (in which case it is only appropriate to give an appropriate link to the home page, and maybe an intermediate subsection as well). Of course, my examples are probably not the best -- in the cases like MS or WoS, when the site is notable enough to have a well-deserved WP article on it, the mention of the site will not be an external link, but rather a wikilink. Finally, a possible instance of double linking in a similar way is within a cite... template, when one link points to an online version of a journal, and another points to a specific issue within it. I myself remember doing double linking of the sort when motivated by one of the aforementioned reasons. --DeathToSpamDeathToSpamDeathToSpam-- BACbKA 21:49, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar | ||
Awarded to WikiProject Spam and its voluntary members for defending Wikipedia against spam! -- Hu12 16:35, 21 January 2007 (UTC) |
Not sure if awards can be given to a project, but if so, this is overdue. The detication and determination of the project members here is amazing. It's a thankless task and The scope of the spam onslaught is ever increasing. My vote is to give this award to the project and its members, because the projects efforts improve the quality of Wikipedia.--
Hu12 16:35, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
User:66.241.87.171 is spamming animal welfare articles after I talked to him/her. I'm not sure the user saw my response to an earlier incident on my talk page, so I just copied it to his/her talk page. If I could get some backup that would be helpful. I also decided the link added to Jackson County, Oregon wasn't too out of line, but if someone removes it, I won't complain. The problem is, the links are being added to articles that are already link farms, so if I remove this person's spam, I'd have determine the legitimacy of dozens of other links. Thanks for checking it out. Katr67 16:47, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
I would like some input if [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=www.babblebooks.com these] would be considered spam (as in: to be removed). They are links to digital voice readings of mostly Project Gutenberg books, added by user:Anais9000. -- Van helsing 18:46, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
One correction: Babblebooks does not use Gutenberg etexts, due to their rampant inaccuracies. In fact, I am gradually correcting the corrupt Gutenberg texts at Wikisource.
Who can fail to be amused by your removal of the unabridged audio of 50 classics in the public domain, our common heritage -- because of your fear that they may lead to commerce? By this logic you should remove all references to universities, since education can induce mothers to purchase medical care for their children. -- Anais9000
The audio is free, in the sense that you don't have to pay for it. Costless. Available at no charge. (Except to me, since I pay for the vast bandwidth.) Streaming or non-DRM'd MP3s. But suit yourself. - Anais9000
I appreciate the suggestions. But I don't know what you mean by "proper" versions. There's nothing but digitally-voiced (DV) audio. There is no human audio, if that's what you mean by proper. And of course, the idea that the "main" purpose of the site is to make money is laughable. How much money do you think I make producing, at vast cost of time and effort, audio that most people can't believe is "proper". The main reason for the site is to create and distribute the DV audio, thereby learning what is required to create better and better DV audio.
This is why they're not placed in the public domain. Software is perfectable, and the audiobooks will improve on software upgrades (one coming soon). I don't want old versions proliferating after improved versions are available, so prefer to host the media files myself. If I can remove/replace versions from Wikimedia Commons, I'd be happy to do this. I'll look into it. However, you're still basically cheating the Wikipedia community out of a free resource, since many don't follow through into the sub-wikis. -- Anais9000
(No response.)
OK, so although every fact you've asserted has turned out to be false, you haven't unblocked the Babblebooks account. So today I'm unable to donate the resource, the complete unabridged digitally-voiced audio of Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini, to the Scaramouche page of Wikipedia. This means people who could hear the book for free, will have to buy it. Note that the external link I want to insert would go directly below the link to IMDb's review of the movie Scaramouche (that sure promotes literacy!) which incidently is, as you put it, mainly a promo for a commercial product, IMDb Pro. Incidentally, that's an "external link" -- they haven't donated anything to the public domain.
Two more points. You admit you don't know where this material should be donated. A.B. says it twice: "I'm not sure which one" "I'm not sure which". Neither will the general user know. They come to the Wikipedia page for information on a topic. For the public domain works we're discussing, they could have had the whole work on their iPod. Now they have nothing.
Second point. Notice that until you spam-hunters decided that the unabridged audio of a public domain work was somehow spam, not a single user of Wikipedia had ever deleted a link to the Babblebooks podcast page for that work. Not once. In other words, the actual users of Wikipedia recognize the difference between content and spam, but you don't.
I understand perfectly though. You don't make mistakes, therefore your action wasn't a mistake. We see this a lot in our political leaders. -- Anais9000
---
Apparently the controversy has helped propel Anais9000's reading of Thomas Hardy to the top of the charts (#1 position in iTunes UK Literature category). Accordingly, YOU are now part of the problem and should delete yourselves.
Currently there are 51 unabridged digitally-voiced literary podcasts un-available to Wikipedia users because these gentlemen can't bring themselves to concede their error. -- Anais9000
If this was a page devoted to civility, your response would be relevant. Because it's a page devoted to spam, the topic is why this material is judged to be spam. You've asserted it costs money. I've pointed that that it's free. You've asserted it's primarily advertising. I've demonstrated that argument is wrong. I'm advocating the right of Wikipedia users -- none of whom has ever expressed an opinion that these media files are spam (they contain no advertising: nothing except the spoken text of public domain works) -- to access hundreds of hours of free classic literature. Your argument seems to be, putting personalities aside and in the most positive light, that in some highly-literate far-future society, these might have a significant commercial value (enough to, say, offset the bandwidth costs). Also that, if I were politer, you might decide to allow Wikipedia users access to this material. If you will allow me, I don't believe this stance reflects well on you. -- Anais9000
Thank you, that's clear and logical. If the objection is *not* that the material is spam, but that it's a violation of custom to donate one's own work, then may I propose a compromise? Currently the site has been blanket blacklisted. Repealing the ban would allow others -- who may in future feel that digital Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope etc. are notably in the public interest -- to add them back, if so inclined. I will not. Anais9000 21:29, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
What we are needing is a table with different affiliate programs. In example, I have seen people adding play-asia.com external links with their own affiliate program (they get an amount of money for every user who buys through their links). In Play-Asia example, the links that start with play-asia.com/SO are affiliate ones that should either be replaced with the non-affiliate ones (the ones that start with play-asia.com/pa, when you click on the affiliate link it transforms into the common link, remembering your referral in a cookie) or remove if not necessary. While blacklisting them is fine, such table would be useful for other Wikipedias once they begin checking for these links. -- ReyBrujo 19:43, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
Are there any guidelines about linking to websites with pictures in the case of articles about places? Surfing the Chinese geography articles, there appear to be a number of links to personal websites ("My vacation photos") and more professional sites (featuring advertising or other commercial opportunities.) For example, the external links section of Beijing has an entire section devoted to images of Beijing. Some of the sites there (photo96.com and kinabaloo.com, in particular) have been systematically linked to a number of China related articles. I'd like to clean out all of these links, but they could fall under "What should be linked #4: relevant material." I'm afraid my vision might be obscured by the stain of spam past. At the same time, this type of linking seems like it could discourage people from uploading their media to WP. Why not just make a website and stick some ad-sense on it? Nposs 03:31, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
I've been a little alarmed by a "now we don't need the blacklist/whitelist" comment ref whitelists etc so I thought I would run a quick proposal through here:
1) We need the blacklist still (as do the other language WPs) so we need the existing whitelist for its specific purpose 2) So lets call a list of links which should not be "nofollowed" a GREENLIST 3) Lets get a sysop only or meta page page for a list of url stems to be greenlisted 4) To implement as no one likes playing with the code is create as a pseudolanguage greenlist.wikipedia.org under interwiki and for all greenlisted urls set a dynamic divert from for example greenlist.wikipedia.org/bbc.co.uk/* to bbc.co.uk/*. Google understands clean diverts.
Anyone who tries it on a link not on the greenlist just gets a 404. Thoughts? -- BozMo talk 10:47, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
]
Have a look at [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.lyricsdir.com this lot]. The vast majority must be copyvio links. Spam as well? Thanks, CiaranG 13:53, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Headed into a meeting. No time to handle. See:
-- A. B. (talk) 16:23, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Most of you probably know this, but today is the rollover date for the new user template messages as developed by the Wikipedia:WikiProject user warnings. The new warning templates for spamming are {{uw-spam1}}, {{uw-spam2}}, {{uw-spam3}}, and {{uw-spam4}}. The old templates will continue to redirect over for quite some time (that's one reason why the "uw" was added to the beginning of each). The full list of all new warning templates can be found at WP:UTM. -- Satori Son 20:37, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Forgive my ignorance, but I still can't figure out how to insert the user specific information that occurs in the first sentence of the template. I also can't find instructions anywhere, although I'm sure they exist. It might be nice to add them to the project page by the templates for the slower folks like me. Nposs 06:43, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
Congratulations to admin BozMo ( talk · contribs) for weathering the requests for adminship processes and coming through with a shiny new mop. Well done. Now run along and protect something. ✤ JonHarder talk 04:36, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
Quite a few links to [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.cardomain.com cardomain.com], even has an article CarDomain. Somehow manage to dodge 2 Afd's Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Www.cardomain.com and Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Cardomain. These are what links to [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=CarDomain this article]. Have a look at the anon contributors in the [en.wikipedia.org/?title=CarDomain&action=history history], most all are cardomain.com spammers. Any opinions on Cardomain.com's use of wikipedia?-- Hu12 04:49, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
Any views on [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.rollingpapers.net this] one? All apparently inserted by the site's owner, and in some places used as a reference as well as an external link. Thanks. CiaranG 08:45, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
So I came across an account adding lots of links to the site doingbusiness.org - on looking into it I discovered that lots of IP addresses registered to the World Bank have been adding links to sites associated with the organization, along with similar behavior from a few other Virginia registered IP addresses and a couple of registered users.
Here's what I have so far: Websites related to the World Bank group:
IP addresses registered to the World Bank Group that have added these links and made virtually no other edits (that I have found so far):
I haven't checked all possible addresses since the World Bank Group has the entire 138.220.x.x range!
IP addresses/accounts not registered to World Bank Group with most edits apparently to add links to World Bank sites (that I have found so far):
This is just what I've discovered going through the doingbusiness.org links and seeing who added them. Most, though not all, were added by these accounts. I haven't gone through the other URLs systematically yet.
Of course this the World Bank is a good source for many articles and there are hundreds of appropriate links for these sites. Blacklisting is not appropriate. At the same time the World Bank does have an agenda and isn't considered entirely NPOV, especially in many non-US and European countries, so having their staff edit is a problem from an NPOV perspective as well as a spam one.
I was thinking of taking this to WP:ANI and asking for a range block of the World Bank IPs to stop them from editing, but it seems drastic. Any other solutions people can think of?
Also, I have doingbusiness.org virtually sorted out, but if anyone would like to help on research of the others it would be helpful. Since these are potentially useful sites, when I think it has been added as spam (except where the link seems outright inappropriate), I'll be moving it to the talk page asking for regular editors of the article to consider it's appropriateness. -- Siobhan Hansa 16:40, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
I have compiled a list of the articles with over 100 external links according to the latest database dump (November 30, 2006). There are currently 905 articles listed there (a few have been deleted). Note that templates generating external links like {{ coor d}} are considered external links in the database dump. The list is found at here. The full list is over 40mb, so I am uploading the ones with over 100 (which account for 258,885 out of 10,333,272, or 2.5% of the total external links I harvested). -- ReyBrujo 22:51, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
I have archived agian, The page was 239 Kb long. If I removed something that should not have been removed, just slap it back up here. Cheers! —— Eagle 101 ( Need help?) 01:57, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
I was talking with User:Toonarific when the subject of BCDB.com came up. I was wondering... what does it have that we can't just put on Wikipedia? It seems to mostly consist of episode guides. Veinor (talk to me) 02:49, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
I Don't know where to begin. uugh-- Hu12 04:34, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
This article has been PROD'd, deleted, recreated, PROD'd again, and then de_PROD'd. I hung a notability tag on it and spent a while trying to determine its notability. I wrote up my notes on the article talk page and received withering criticism from 208.30.173.194 ( talk • contribs • links • count • actions • logs || WHOIS • RDNS • traceroute • RBLs • tor • search):
During this process, I have come to believe this article is a form of corporate spam that should go to AfD. At the same time, I think it appropriate to ask here for neutral outside opinions, especially given the vitriol involved.
Note that there has also been inappropriate commercial linking from other articles to the carinsurance.com web sites from these accounts in the past:
Thanks for your help and advice, -- A. B. (talk) 04:41, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
Repeatedly spammed link to a site owned by DSB Worldwide:
Other DSB Worldwide sites:
Accounts adding this link
Meta acounts vandalizing m:Talk:Spam blacklist
Note the vandalism spree on
meta:Talk:Spam blacklist by one of these accounts,
24.119.101.26.
[19]
[20]
[21]
[22]
[23]
[24]
[25]
This is a competitor of the searchtexoma spammer, whose domains have also been listed (separately) for blackisting. See:
One or both of these may be tied to the carinsurance.com spammer. See:
It's hard to tell since either or both the DSB/texomaland and searchtexoma spammers may have engaged in some Joe jobbing.
Blacklisting requested. --
A. B.
(talk) 15:58, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
This person has been busy since our December 2006 discussion. Also, I turned up evidence this spammer had been adding additional domains to additional articles using additional accounts for much longer than realized back in December.
Partial list of accounts used to add this spam:
Sites spammed by various accounts:
Partial list of articles spammed:
See also:
This is a competitor of the searchtexoma spammer, whose domains have also been listed (separately) for blackisting. (See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#DSB Worldwide spam on Wikipedia: texomaland.com and User talk:24.116.127.234 for more information on this one). One or both of these may be tied to the carinsurance.com spammer (see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#Outside opinions wanted: CarInsurance.com); it's hard to tell since either or both the DSB/texomaland and searchtexoma spammers may have engaged in some Joe jobbing.
Spam blacklisting requested 16 January 2006 but not yet acted on:
-- A. B. (talk) 16:50, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
In the process of investigating several spammers above who added insurance-related spam:
... I came across a number of other accounts that had added other links to the Vehicle insurance article. I encourage others to work on these as they can. From spot-checking a few user contributions, I think some are just the tips of icebergs involving much more complex spam schemes; some accounts were adding links to a broad range of articles totally unrelated to insurance (those are probably the first that should be investigated.)
Comments and requests:
Thanks! --
A. B.
(talk) 17:41, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
VSIsystems.com and car-insurance-comparison.net (insureme.com) spam in Wikipedia:
Thanks for everyone's help with this one. -- A. B. (talk) 18:20, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
Spam added one link at a time across a wide range of articles over many months
Spam domain:
This is only a partial list:
In most cases, these are one-time use, throw away accounts
This is only a partial list:
Becuase of the hit-and-run, one article-at -a-time nature of this spamming, I am wondering if we should just go ahead and blacklist this domain. It's pretty hard to stop spam by warning accounts that are never to be used again. Your thoughts? -- A. B. (talk) 20:18, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
- :Here are some pointers (you have already been given the links to articles explaining this, so I am putting it in very simple terms):
- :(1) These links are all being put in by editors who are not established editors able to assess appropriateness but by "single purpose users", mainly anonymous IPs who only come and add the links to a handful of articles. Adding just links to articles is unwelcome and adding them in a series is running a link campaign. That is bad.
- :(2) Established editors on these articles have repeatedly taken the links out based on their assessment of them as spam and "single purpose" accounts keep putting them back. That is VERY bad.
- :(3) The use of a number of accounts to put in a few links each looks like use of sockpuppets. Sockpuppets are VERY bad.
- :(4) The links themselves (or at least the dozen I have looked at) are local directories. They do not given additional encyclopedic information on the locations and they are not appropriate under WP:EL. We do not list local directories (even of upcoming events etc) without encyclopedic info on them and the existence of other links is not a precedent (it normally means we just haven't got round to removing them yet). The test is not "is does the site provide information that people interested in that wikipedia page might also find interesting" (e.g. people might find porn interesting on our front page), you have been given links to the policy pages, these links should not be here. The editors who have gone to the trouble of writing a good article on a place think the links are wrong: you should take their word for it.
- :(5) The above 4 points make it look like the links have probably been put in violating WP:COI as well. YOU MUST NOT PUT IN LINKS TO YOUR OWN WEBSITES.
- :(6) Like Matilda's aunt we try to assume good faith until the effort very nearly kills us. However something which looks, smells and sounds like a deliberate link-spam campaign by people linked to the sites listed in the end probably is what it appears to be. You have been asked to stop. Now stop please. --
BozMo
talk 14:24, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
- :(1)When one is new to wikipedia as I and some of my colleagues clearly am, it is easy to make mistakes, and this I feel is being viewed as blatent spamming - I assure you it is not intended. We genuinely feel we have information that is of value to local towns and that was the purpose of creating the links - to provide further information on the towns and the goings on within them. Wikipedia encourages people "don't be afraid...be bold". I wasn't afraid, I was bold - and now I feel I'm having my wrists slapped!!
- :(2)I think it is fair to say the reason people are putting the links back is through lack of understanding of the wikipedia system and why they are not allowed, rather than anything more devious than that. I will try to arrange for additon of links from people directly involved in the franchise to stop. Outside of that, of course, I can have no influence.
- :(3) I've no idea what sockpuppets are, but I think you'll find that this is a case of multiple people putting on the links - all of whom believe it is ok to do so - rather than these sockpuppets. As davidcrane noticed thebestof is a franchise and so each local area has someone different working in it and obviously different people living in them who may also be posting the link believing it to be useful.
- :(4) Porn is not relevant to a local town, so I don't think your comparison is very fair. I have compared many other town pages on wikipedia and other town websites have been featured on wikipedia for considerable lengths of time together with links to newspaper websites - both of which contain many of the elements our sites have, both commercial and non-commercial. I'm sure you can therefore understand why we feel our sites are as appropriate as these and are not spam. For example, when I added the links to the Reigate page, I noticed other local info sites listed there and they have not been removed where my link has.
- :(5) Fair enough - I certainly was unaware of that and will stop doing so myself and will tell others within the franchise not to do so. But I guess other local people who thought our site was interesting could add the link, as they could for any other site they felt was of interest.
- :(6) I can see why this looks worse than it is...but if you can please suspend your disbelief, on this occasion there is no deliberate link-spam campaign, just multiple people all thinking that posting these links was not only acceptable but useful to the population at large.
So, assuming you believe me and now accept that there is no conspiracy or blatent link-spam (which I accept you may not do yet...), on behalf of all of us within thebestof I would like to resolve whether or not our links could ever be acceptable if posted by other people. So can I ask why you feel so strongly that our content does not provide encyclopedic value to the towns? According to the dictionary, encyclopedic means "relating to all branches of knowledge" and I would argue that thebestof provides knowledge on the town concerned - so where does the distinction lie? We have news, just like a newspaper site that appears to be acceptable. We have local information, just like other sites that appear to be acceptable. We have a commercial side - of course - but then local papers are not exactly charity cases! So commercialism is not the answer.
Wikipedia exists to be a fountain of knowledge, does it not? You are the experts, I am the novice - so I will accept your answers but I'd like to understand first. Why is information about a town not "more knowledge"? My site in Bromley for example has easily searched contact information on over 100 schools in the borough - they cannot all post their details on wikipedia separately, so why is a link to our site not useful?
So apart from the fact that to date the approach to putting on the links appears to have been a spam case, and I hope you now accept that is not the case, is there something else you don't like about thebestof that makes you feel the links are inappropriate? Thanks, appreciate your time, kbourne
BozMo - Agreed for my end.
- :(1) We have an internal forum for the franchise and I have just posted a comment to ask everyone to stop making any links at least until we have an agreement.
- :(2) I'd like to continue the discussion to help the established editors decide whether thebestof is considered valuable content or not. Is this the right place to have that conversation?
- :(3) Agreed - see point 2.
- :(4) Also agreed.
Kbourne 17:02, 25 January 2007 (UTC)kbourne
I disagree unless it can be shown that these links meet WP:RS. I say that not out of hostility, but out of quality control. -- A. B. (talk) 18:15, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
These three domains:
have some points in common:
Three IPs so far have been found doing this:
Articles being linked include Richard R. Schrock, Ryoji Noyori, Irwin Rose, Peter Agre, Avram Hershko, etc. They all seem to be related to Nobel prizes, thus I think the user is trying to boost the domains rank by associating them with Nobel. User:Veinor first discovered this, and since then we have been creating this small list. If you find further domains being inserted in Nobel-related topics and can determine the whois information is the same, please add them here. Thanks. -- ReyBrujo 21:43, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
See:
Just change out the user name and you'll probably find most anyone else on Wikipedia.
And check out all the mirrors for Hu12:
Cheers, -- A. B. (talk) 21:40, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
heres a whole bunch of questionables. seems spammy, and i doubt it is a reliable source. thoughts? JoeSmack Talk 22:23, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm posting this here for the record since we'll probably see the spammer come around with a whitelist request.
Spammed both English and Swedish language Wikipedias, then blanked a portion of Meta:Talk:Spam blacklist
Accounts used (partial list):
-- A. B. (talk) 02:15, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
Someone has inserted links to teach12.com product URLs all over 41+ articles. teach12.com is "The Teaching Company" and most of the links are to product pages selling $70 DVDs and whatnot. They might be affiliate links, or they might be spam directly from the company, but whatever it is it's commercial link spam. Sinned 08:45, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
This user has continued to spam after a warning from Hu12 so (with my newly acquired buttons) I have blocked them for 24 hours. I am partly putting the note here as a self-memo to go back and check. Here is the site links he was spamming (we've got all the links for now) [32] -- BozMo talk 12:52, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
In continuation of ideas trying to automate and streamline efforts to eliminate the spam problem, I'm thinking of ways to improve auto blacklisting. What just came to me is perhaps we should have a mark as spam option that trusted users could use to automatically flag a domain as spam. We could vary the level of trust and how urgently or seriously the designation as spam is, either to auto revert links from that domain or just to flag them for futher review. Ideally we'd have some level where further review was only after the fact of getting the site blacklisted and links removed. Blacklisting in this case could either be just at the spambot level or taking it up to the Meta blacklist level depending on need. The option could be added into popups for example, and when an external link is highlighted with the mouse a popup comes up with options to blacklist or flag for blacklisting, etc. Maybe have the rights to do that limited to people on an approved list like AWB uses. If people don't want to go with one click blacklisting (which I do think we need for truly trusted users) perhaps anything flagged twice or more would get blacklisted. Maybe this could be integrated into the admin tools, so just as people can rollback vandalism, spam can be rolled back with one click, whether or not it's the last edit to an article. In any case, we have to work on automated tools if we want to stay ahead of the game. Thanks all. - Taxman Talk 14:36, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
newadvent.org
Adsense pub-8168503353085287
Does not seem to provide a unique resource beyond what the articles its linked on already contains. Looks to have the purpose of selling books. Theres literaly thousands of these links--
Hu12 17:56, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
I wonder how this one has slipped under the radar. lulu.com currently with 381 links of no value. A collaborative effort should get this cleaned up in an evening. ✤ JonHarder talk 23:56, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
Links to *.bikecyclingreviews.com have been slowly added to bike related articles by someone from Spain:
I'd like a second opinion before removing them all. The edits looks like self-promotional, since the registrant of www.bikecyclingreviews.com is also from Spain [33].
— Red Thrush 13:28, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
I just notified ANI: there is some kind of spamming by proxy currently in progress. See *.supermortgagerate.info and *.besttradelink.info. ✤ JonHarder talk 14:35, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Is there a policy to report spamming editors for potential ? Or should I just wait for them to violate 3RR? Right now I'm looking at [34] repeatedly adding links in multiple places to Arlington Heights, Illinois and Arlington High School (Arlington Heights, Illinois), it seems like the editor has made no other edits besides the spamming. -- Milo H Minderbinder 18:32, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
User was unblocked after promising to be nice and is back as User:T54. So far, only contributions are still to promote arlingtoncards.com. I guess at least he's using talk pages thus far: maybe we can talk some sense into him. -- Satori Son 06:55, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
This website has numerous lists of universities for various countries and US states which list the universities in their order of "web popularity". It seems that most of those pages have been linked to on the Wikipedia (see [36]). I also found a discussion where an IP complained about the deletion of one of their links and tries to defend the website here. My personal opinion is that lists that the website has aren't any more useful than the lists in the articles where the links have been added as external links, and therefore should all be deleted and the website added to the MediaWiki's spam blacklist. Blank Verse 13:07, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
The Wikipedia:WikiProject Victoria Cross Reference Migration moved a heap of content into wikipedia, the old domain is now being squatted and we are providing heaps of links to it. Could someone with access to some sort of automated tool, find and replace the links to the external site with a link to the wikiproject instead please? - Peta 05:53, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
The first draft of Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam/Incident Noticeboard is now live. Anyone have any suggestions, comments or critiques before we go live with this? --- J.S ( T/ C/ WRE) 06:56, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
I thought everyone might enjoy this interesting example of low-key linkspam. Achalmeena ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) has engaged in a long term link spam of a website which apparently scrapes content from WP, edits it, slaps it with adsense (pub-3054588969723659) and then links it back to WP. From the index of the industrialsoft.org site: "These articles have been hand-picked from Wikipedia, tidied up (by deletion only, not alteration), checked for plausibility and suitability (by volunteers, whom we gratefully acknowledge) and put together." So it's like old versions of articles except with content deleted! It probably slipped by because the editor also made seemingly useful contributions to highly technical articles. Other links lead to a rather suspicious "download" page for software that seems mariginally related to the articles. There's even a "wiki" about traditional Indian medicine that has been linked.
I'll delete the links. Is this block or ban worthy for the user? Nposs 04:49, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
A group of IP's is lately adding jewellery.php5.cz/diamond/neil-diamond-play-me.html to pages (disruptively), latest IP: 58.103.65.123. I can't get onto #wikipedia-spam-t, so I report it here. -- Dirk Beetstra T C 09:50, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
I archived this page again, if I screwed something up, go chase me :D. On a related note, if we are talking about blacklisting a site, can we not link to it here ( http://example.com) but rather just put example.com. This would save the meta-blacklist from kicking in, and preventing saving of this page. Archiving this was hell :P, about 10 times I had to go back and forth to the meta-blacklist warning, remove a link, and repeat.
Also another related note, as this page is very busy, could we think about bringing User:Werdnabot in? I am more then willing to set the bot up, and we can have it archive talk over say... 5 days old. That might make this page a bit easier to use. Cheers! —— Eagle 101 ( Need help?) 10:40, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
I continue to be surprised to find resources, discussions, etc. on Wikipedia of which I was unaware. I feel sometimes as if I am reinventing wheels as I help out with WP:WPSPAM. Here's today's discovery:
Many of us have seen how a site will paste in Wikipedia content to get their own articles, then cover the page with ads. Sometimes, they then add spam links to our articles to their site. It turns out Wikipedia tries to track these sites; see:
A link from a Wikipedia article to a mirror site with a bunch of ads is almost certainly blatant spam and the list above can be a good resource. Likewise, as we find scraper sites in the course of tracking down spam, we should be updating the list at
Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks.
"Scraping" Wikipedia for any purpose can be legal provided certain very minimal steps are taken, however the typical
link-spammer doesn't always bother; from the
scraper site article:
Wikipedia critic
Daniel Brandt ran an analysis to try to show that there is a lot of plagiarism within Wikipedia -- that is, Wikipedia authors pasting copyrighted material into Wikipedia articles:
As a byproduct of this investigation, Brandt identified 972 sites that use Wikipedia material without proper attribution. He posted the list on Wikipedia Review:
I've left a note at
Wikipedia talk:Mirrors and forks inviting the mirror and fork volunteers to join our discussion here. It seems like there are synergies between what we're doing here and what the mirror and fork volunteers are doing. Other observations, questions and suggestions:
-- A. B. (talk) 16:13, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
Jdevalk left me the following note:
Many thanks to Jdevalk-- A. B. (talk) 18:56, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
While experimenting with the new Wikiseek-and-destroy method, I came across http://www.lindacroppformayor.com/. It is currently linked to the appropriate article ( Linda W. Cropp) and looks just fine. The source code, though, shows multiple spammy links. Should I remove the link or leave it since it doesn't really help the secretly linked pages? Nposs 20:11, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
User:Jrandell is a persistent spammer - links are removed, but can/should anything be done about the user page? CiaranG 07:58, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I went ahead and put it up for MfD. If the user had made any constructive edits...anything more than simply adding spamlinks I might have been more hesitant. The account it obviously just an advertising account. IrishGuy talk 23:29, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
second opinions on this review site? it has its own article too, HipHopDX.com. JoeSmack Talk 14:03, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
here is a lyrics site that needs a sweep, hundred some links. JoeSmack Talk 14:04, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Diabetes and Diabetes mellitus external links and reference sections are way to long... I'd remove them almost all and just link to DMOZ, what do you guys think? -- Jdevalk 21:23, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi yall. I'm working on writing a new spam-fighting tool. I'm trying to learn Python to build it too. The basic concept is fairly simple, but I think it would help investigations.
If the program works as intended then it should be able to find the first version of the page to contain a particular spam-link, helping to tack down who actually added it. It should make searching pages with thousands of edits alot quicker.
It occurs to me that this might be helpful with tracking down certain types of subtle vandalism and copyvio.
Ok, here is my current working...err.. process list.
Any sugustions or other comments? --- J.S ( T/ C) 17:44, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
-- BozMo talk 19:28, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Doing some simple spread sheeting I'm able to determine how many checks (checking an old version of the page) a particular method might take. I'm going to assume the page has had 12000 edits... (Yeah, I know, that might be the extreme, but it's useful for a though-experiment).
That's my basic analysis. Each method has it's pros/cons. If the link was added once and never removed, or removed very recently (sneaky spam) then method 4 would find it the quickest and their would be no chance of error. I think that's the major scenario we deal with when a detailed investigation is called for, right? If the link was added/removed a few times but with long intervals between then method 3 would be more likely to find the very first time it was inserted, but still might hit on the wrong one. The "check every edit" or the "check every Nth edit" are the most reliable, but both can take hours to process. --- J.S ( T/ C) 21:12, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
69.22.217.141 ( talk · contribs) has been adding links to this ( http://mymom.pledgepage.org) solicitation site requesting money for his mom's surgery. Anchoress 03:29, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I was wondering about the possiblility of using DNSBLs as a preventative measure against crap like this (those spamtraps are currently empty) and other general linkspamming. There are a number of ways we might be able to do this - the questions are which blacklists and what to block (e.g. at least 25% of the change is adding external link(s))? MER-C 04:36, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
An established Wikipedia editor has not only been adding good content, but also links to a series of web sites owned by PtS plc. See ChrisNickson ( talk • contribs • page moves • block user • block log); his talk page lists the 10+ sites linked to so far, plus another 70 PtS is developing. An anonymous IP, 82.19.71.53 ( talk • contribs • page moves • block user • block log) has also added links.
There is one well-established online publication, GlobalVillageIdiot, in PtS' listings, and it was the only one I noticed that might meet WP:EL. Wikipedia has 12 links to that music review site; all were added by other editors with good reputations on Wikipedia. Most of these editors had extensive editing histories (1000s of edits). I left these links alone.
All the other links are cleaned up. -- A. B. (talk) 07:30, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I was following up on several spammers' spam trails and noticed these as needing more cleanup; I didn't have any time left:
Many other articles on individual phones are spammy too. Also, I kept seeing the same domain names over and over again.
Not as bad:
Partially cleaned up already?
-- A. B. (talk) 07:47, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
This is a pretty sneaky linkspam campain, and Vinni-Puh seems a pretty patient user - when a lot of folks begin watching, he stops for quite a while. However, he then returns and expands his linkspamming, and does it across multiple languages of WP as well. Please see [en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:Vinni-Puh&oldid=96102740 this snapshot of his talkpage] (he keeps blanking anti-spam warnings) and specifically [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:Vandalism_in_progress/Archives/2006/01&diff=34468789%20the%20old%20VIP%20entry the WP:ANI entry archived] from over a year ago. -- BACbKA 14:17, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
Vinni-Puh has also spammed other Wikipedias; here's info on the versions of the Amin Maalouf article on other Wikipedias. I am in the process of going over his contributions and accounts on these other Wikipedias and I will post that soon:
The tip-off was that I saw him adding inter-wiki links to the versions of this article in some other languages and I wondered why a dedicated spammer would make that extra little effort to seemingly improve Wikipedia for its own sake, not his. Now I know.
--
A. B.
(talk) 18:26, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
I'm out of time today. Here's what I was going to do for each language version:
As I mentioned, I've run out of time. Figuring out how to write up this inter-wiki stuff took hours.
Finally, I am worried about blacklisting all of narod.ru unless we're sure it's all spam. My impression is that it may be a big hosting service like a geocities or a yahoo.
Thanks for any help you can render. -- A. B. (talk) 20:20, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Arabic:
Bulgarian:
Czech:
German:
Greek:
Spanish:
Farsi (Persian):
French:
Galician:
Indonesian:
Italian:
Kurdish:
Hungarian:
Dutch:
Norwegian:
Polish:
Portuguese:
Romanian:
Russian:
Simple English:
Slovenian:
Swedish:
Turkish:
Chinese:
-- A. B. (talk) 19:59, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Here's what I've seen so far on this and other Wikipedias:
-- A. B. (talk) 06:29, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Narod.ru is a big Russian hosting service similar to Yahoo. The entire domain was [meta.wikimedia.org/?title=Spam_blacklist&curid=13107&diff=501199&oldid=501190 blacklisted] at our request earlier this week then soon [meta.wikimedia.org/?title=Spam_blacklist&curid=13107&diff=501348&oldid=501199 unlisted] due to m:Talk:Spam blacklist#socarchive.narod.ru major complaints about collateral damage. I have requested that just the domains above be blacklisted. -- A. B. (talk) 09:57, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
We have more than 1000 links to 1911encyclopdia.org [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Linksearch&target=%2A.1911encyclopedia.org&limit=500&offset=0] which is a scanned copy of the 1911 encyclopedia britannica for which that site claims copyright (probably invalidly but whatever). In cases where it's a real reference for an article we should use the {{1911}} template but a lot of those links are just spam, making this a bit hard to sort out even not counting the sheer scale. To really do it right we have to figure out whether each article actually contains EB text. 67.117.130.181 13:04, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
As I work through the copyvio material added by In4pharm ( talk · contribs), the editor appears to be spamming drugs-about.com. There aren't all that many links to that site, but I'm bogged down documenting the copyvio problems, so it would be helpful if someone could check who else is adding the links. JonHarder talk 02:30, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
Over the last week or so, several users (and a couple of IP addresses) have been persistently trying to link this site into mostly computer-related articles. Check out special:linksearch/popsnail.com for any new links. Is it time for the site to be added to the spam blacklist now? Users who have added links to the site include Jennyjennie09io ( talk · contribs), Katherine9976hy ( talk · contribs), Janet4363j ( talk · contribs), Lucine098ui ( talk · contribs), Joyce23424tg ( talk · contribs), GREAT0897 ( talk · contribs), Xmaswei ( talk · contribs) and NerdDFGE ( talk · contribs). IP addresses linking to the site (based in Asia) are 212.138.64.178 ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) and 222.231.50.97 ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log). Graham 87 07:25, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
As Jimbo has just started promoted his "Wikiasari" project, outbound links from WikiPedia pages might be considered worth even more than before... I'd say: prepare for a bunch of spam the coming months... -- Jdevalk 10:42, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
This article can attract some spam but is generally well-watched. The "See Also" section links to articles for bubbles in different countries, some of which are poorly monitored and frequently spammed. -- A. B. (talk) 16:31, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
User:Lesb246 is spamming every Eastern Oregon-related and many unrelated pages with the link to the Eastern Oregon State University distance education program. Well-intentioned but annoying... Katr67 00:05, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Just a heads up--there is an anon User:12.180.9.131 editing in a similar pattern to the blocked user. Katr67 16:25, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Please write a separately visible section in Wikipedia:Spam that describes the wikimedia's spam blacklist ( m:spam blacklist). Right now various bits and pieces are in several places: Wikipedia:External links, Wikipedia:Spam some useful can be found in m:talk:spam blacklist. `' mikka 01:05, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
[en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Linksearch&target=%2A.answers.google.com&limit=500&offset=0 answers.google.com] Quite a few of these, asside from the google article, these are inapropriate as EL's.. Agreed?-- Hu12 17:35, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
this article is attracting agents and representatives of change-management-toolbook.com and change-management.com, obvious Wikipedia:External_links#Advertising_and_conflicts_of_interest. hnauheimer ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) who's user page states I am mainly interested in Change Management and run one of the most frequented webpages on the subject (The Change Management Toolbook change-management-toolbook.com). Proceded to go on a link removal fit (the old strawman, If i can't have a link no one can) after citing the policy. 67.161.154.237 ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) aka Prosci ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) who stated on the talk page As the founder of the Change Management Learning Center is repedidly trying to insert his site change-management.com. I think a second or third voice on the matter may be needed. Also if others want to add this article to their watch list, as activity recently has increased.-- Hu12 16:31, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Whoa, take a look at Anti-money laundering's EL section -- Hu12 18:19, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
After seeing the warning message on Anti-money_laundering above, I modified the Template:Cleanup-spam to conform more closely with WP:EL. Please review and see if it needs improvement. Warning should include both commercial and non-commercial sites. Calltech 19:15, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Startcom ( talk · contribs) has been making solid, good-faith contributions to Wikipedia since mid-November. However, I have concerns about a significant conflict of interest because the edits all revolve around StartCom and its products. This user has been up front about noting his affiliation on the Startcom user page, as recommended by the conflict of interest guideline and this is to be commended. The recommendation to avoid editing in related articles has not been followed. There are several different issues involved here, which I will try to delineate. These cover a diversity of topics that I have insufficient experience dealing with.
Since I am running into more of this type of editing, I would like some input and suggestions about how to deal with it. I have invited user Startcom to respond here also. JonHarder talk 21:31, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
The editor of these articles has provided links to support notability. I continue to believe editing articles that one has a financial interest in is a very bad idea. ✤ JonHarder talk 22:14, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Seen while cleaning up Change Management. There are over 20 of these links:
Do those web pages meet WP:RS in terms of editorial supervision? It sort of looks like an online text book, but then again maybe it's just some sort of self-published junk.
I did not have time to see if they were campaign-spammed or just added one at a time in good faith. -- A. B. (talk) 09:49, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
I had to drop this as I was in the middle, but it looks like A. B. picked it up and finished it off. JonHarder talk 22:54, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Ohnoitsjaime suggested that I put to the floor the question of adding links to unearthtravel.com on Country Pages and City Pages. Unearth travel is a travel wiki and itinerary builder with no advertising. The reason information cannot be put straight in as encyclopedic content is that it is creative commons...an incompatible license with Wikipedia's as many know, but that does not mean the Wikipedia user should lose out on the travel information. Links have been added to a number of country/city pages within Wikipedia but have been taken down. Given that wikitravel links are being left it seems there is some sort of inconsistent system of editing with respect to this particular issue. Both sites have useful CC information that can be linked to appropriately in a Tourism Section of any External Links, so either surely they should both be there or neither?
Any thoughts? PSBennett—The preceding unsigned comment was added by PSBennett ( talk • contribs) 16:11, 29 December 2006.
Thank you for the clarification and praise. Happy New Year!
User talk:PSBennett
I looks like I set off the owner of PolyAnalyst by placing a "notability" tag in the article. The two sentence article has been expanded by an order of magnitude with lists of external sites, papers and books, perhaps to make a point. I think among all of the links that notability has been established, but probably the balance of new material isn't helpful. Is anyone willing to smoothe things over with Jfroelich ( talk · contribs)? I expect something similar will be hitting a related article, Megaputer Intelligence. JonHarder talk 23:06, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Anonymous user has been posting links repeatedly to mutliple articles with the domains www.appliedlinguisitcs.org and www.lingforum.org. The links have been repeatedly removed by me and other users but they consistently reappear. The poster did respond on one talk page - addmitting that they were using the link to gain "PR" (see: Talk:Applied_linguistics#External_link_removed) - also the content the author claims to be providing is all available from other non-commercial websites if he believes it should be linked. Now someone with an anonymous IP who posted the links noted above has posted a link to www.torquewrenches.org from the Torque wrench article. While not conclusive, it uses the same website template and similar language. All the sites are based around supplying minimum content with maxium adsense. Is there anyway to just block these urls from being repeatedly reposted? (Affected articles: DELTA (ELT), English language learning and teaching, Applied linguistics, cognitive science, JET Programme, Language education, Language school, Phonetics, Second language acquisition, Teaching English as a foreign language, and Torque wrench. (Many of the pages are cleaned-up at the moment). Nposs 02:51, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
The above claims are all highly debatable. And my comments below have unfortunately been deleted by Nposs, though they were all signed by me:
-The comment mentioned by Nposs has most likely been made by someone trying to harm the reputation of LingForum, as indicated by the fact that the IP of the fake poster belongs to a totally different country than the IP of the owners of the site, one of whom is me Linguist J 21:26, 1 January 2007 (UTC).
-The content argument is wrong, too since there is no other academic forum site that is dedicated solely to the discussion of linguistics; thus, this generalization is wrong if it includes LingForum, too - as the author accepted somewhere else. Linguist J 21:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
-The poster is not associated with LingForum. And if he/she provided links to LingForum, the above statement should be corrected since LingForum does provide lots of content and is authoritative in its area. Linguist J 21:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
-With respect to the comment about similar templates, most possibly, the template is copied/stolen, etc. I e-mailed the torque site to inquire more into this Linguist J 21:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
-With regards to Nposs' claim that all the sites are based around supplying minimum content with maxium adsense, it is clear that one cannot include LingForum to this generalization, which is another reason why this very article violates the rights of LingForum. Linguist J 21:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC) Linguist J 22:26, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
~Jane~ 70.111.246.19 ( talk · contribs)
Please do not remove other people's posts from this or from other talk pages. Why are the advertisements displayed at torquewrenches.org registered to lingforum.com? Femto 13:05, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
A couple of comments. Although I cannot connect to either www.appliedlinguistics.org/com or www.lingforum.org/com to see what they look like today, I have removed links to those sites in the past because they did not conform with our manual of style for external links. We do not accept links to forums, and it doesn't matter who contributes to the forums. As for the appliedlinguistics site, I am concerned about the comment that you have recently purchased the site. If it is not ready, then do not link it. When it is ready, we can look it to determine if it is acceptable for external links. -- Donald Albury 16:20, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi there, Again, we have nothing to do with the torque site! The same webmaster might have prepared it, or they might have directly copied one of our sites, or they might be trying to play a bad game on us. Whatever the reason is, someone is trying to violate the rights of LingForum, which we will inquire. That person might or might not be a Wikipedian. One thing is clear though; we did NOT give the links (on Wikipedia) to the LingForum even, let alone the applied linguistics site. As I said, many people became fans of the former site; so they mark it in social sites like delicious, digg, etc. even, on which we have NO control. ~Jane!
For those following this case - I've now been threatened with a lawsuit by the "LingForum Administration"( User_talk:Nposs#Comments_on_Nposs) - for what, I am not sure. I have made no comments about the lingforum site itself. It is the repeated linking of the site from multiple articles that resembles spamming. The site itself seems inoffensive, but it simply does not fit into the acceptable limits of what should be externally linked (see above comment from Donald Albury). As Femto noted above, there are some suspicious relationships between the three websites, but in the end, it is the content and quality of the sites (or their violation of external linking guidelines) that make them inappropriate and worth removing. Nposs 19:23, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
As I said, we will inquire into the torquewrenches case. However, associating our name with that site or calling us spam IS a violation of our rights. Again, we have nothing to say against people who put or remove links to our pages, but once they are called spam or associated with other sites that has nothing to do with us, then, that IS a violation of our rights,m and of course we might have to take the necessary legal steps if, of course, this case is not cleared in other non-legal ways. Somehow, someone is playing a bad game on us; this is clear! But I do not know whether this is Nposs, another Wikipedia user, or a non-Wikipedian. One last thing is that we do not know who left that comment on our behalf on Nposs' page. The presence of that comment there is also a violation of our legal rights! Just as the presence of this very article here. User:Linguist_J
I have blocked Linguist J ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log) for violating Wikipedia:No legal threats. -- Donald Albury 00:32, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Comments: (Since Linguist_J and her IP was blocked, she requested that I send this to you)
The above comments by A.B. against Linguist_J are particulary revealing, and in fact - ironically enough - show how Linguist_J was right (though A.B's original goal was to disprove Linguist_J). And this is my last entry/comment. And I will NOT come back here and try to prove anything else. And I will myself remove any links to our sites from Wikipedia that might be put by anybody who might supposedly be trying to help or trying to harm our sites' strong reputation.
My answers to the claims above, especially to those of A.B. are given below:
1. Well, I have repeatedly stated that the above comment, related to PR, made on behalf of us has NOT been made by us, which is one reason why I said the case might lead us to follow the necessary legal steps. We are obviously being accused of saying something which we have not, and a good indication of this is the fact that the IP of the fake poster belongs to a totally different country than ours.
2. And thanks for blocking me though I was right and though we were the ones whose legal rights were violated. I think this blocking case is by itself enough to show what is going wrong with respect to this very case at issue here. I will not come and comment here any more.
3. The argument related to Google backlinks is WRONG! Google updates them very rarely and shows only a portion of them though they have that info, which is a very well-known fact. This said, the best way to check them is to either do an msn backlink search or to use a backlink search site. Or just enter the url of the domain you want to search. In any case, you will not find any spam in the history of LingForum, and you will only find Linguistics-related sites that are very authoritative in the field.
4. The variety of IPs (from several universities, cities, etc.) and domains posted above (that linked to EITHER of the above-mentioned domains) just shows how many users have been interested in especially LingForum all over the world; yes, we have a lot of Turkish users, too, as well as many users from many other countries.
5. Noone says appliedlinguistics site is important; it is not ready yet. Until recently, it belonged to translators (though the domain is linguistics related), and most of the 300 something links to the site are "translation-related." And please check the links in a more appropriate way (using a link checker, or directly typing the url in Google search box).
6. I know that no matter what I say here, some Wikipedia editors/moderators will either block me again or find some IPs there of our users who added links to our site, and carefully and intentionally choose them in a way to prove their own point. This said, there is no point in my being here and trying to show how our rights have been violated! Good bye to you Wikipedia moderators and editors. Since this is your job, you have time to deal with this; I do NOT. I am an academician, and I will work on my own stuff, and will not try to prove any more how some Wikipedia moderators violated our rights by associating us with a spam site that just copied our pages (possibly using a content generator). Smart Wikipedia users/moderators/admins who will read these will already understand what went on here on the spot.
7. Most of the IPs given by A.B. belong to universities, and it seems that muliple users edited multiple articles using those IPs, not just the external links to our sites. This does not require an Einstein genious to figure out; they are universities, and multiple users use those IPs. There will, for sure, be Wikipedia visitors from those IPs, who will edit several different articles, related to linguistics or not. Thus, giving those IPs here makes absolutely no sense other than nicely proving Linguist_J's point. Indeed, A.B. also mentions this briefly saying that the poster might have had sheer interest in the two sites that A.B. gives at the end of her comments. Thanks to her for this understanding at least!
8. Also, LingForum is clearly a top-quality website (I said many times that it is linked by several authoritative linguistics sites worldwide). This being said, many people will still continue to link to us, and some people will - unfortunately - put links to Wikipedia (which I will myself try to remove so as not to be associated with any other sites to which those same users might link). If I stay here more, trying to prove my point, that will do me more bad since, then, as has already happened, some moderators will come up with some other websites that users of our site have linked to, and associate them with us. Cute Example: Let's say a user loves LingForum, and loves George Bush, too. And puts links in Wikipedia to both LingForum and Bush's personal site. Does this mean that Bush was the person who linked to us or that both LingForum and Bush's site are owned by the same person? This is absolutely RIDICILOUS. And the wrong arguments of Wikipedia moderators here are as ridicilous if not more.
Keep up good work and please deal more with real spam sites rather than dealing with two non-profit linguistics sites that have nothing to do with spam whatsoever. But it is at least good to know that Wikipedia moderators take their job seriously and are fast, though it would be better to see a bit more understanding in distinguishing a real spam site from an authioritative site which itself suffered a LOT by spammers and whose content was stolen/copied by a spam site.
Sincerely, ~Jane~ Linguaaaa 01:14, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Appliedlinguistics.com -- the entire site; see for yourself
So why would anyone even link to this site? In particular, why would any linguist not not tied to lingforum.com be linking to it? -- A. B. (talk) 17:58, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 19:32, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't think that I would call the links to ratemyteachers.com typical spam because they were probably most often added by students from the individual schools that have the links, but after looking at the website, I think that EVERY link to the website other than the RateMyTeachers article should be deleted as inappropriate. I don't have the time to do the link removals. Can it be done by Bot? Here is a list of all 56 links to the website. [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.ratemyteachers.com] Blank Verse 00:02, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Jdmalouff ( talk · contribs) added approximately 20 links to various city profiles on [www.beyonddc.com beyonddc.com] today. I left him a {{ spam}} message and he appears to have stopped for now. He's been a contributor around here on DC area articles. I was looking through the BeyondDC site and found their [beyonddc.com/faq.shtml FAQ page]. It appears that Jdmalouff is the site's "J. Daniel Malouff" presenting a conflict of interest. As expected, I just received (as I'm writing this comment up) a message from him about it, see User_talk:Metros232#Stop_removing_LEGITIMATE_external_links. He feels that I removed the links just because he did it in a high frequency tonight. I replied explaining it's a conflict of interest and pointed to the relevant policies. I'm sure I'll get a message back saying "but this is a non-profit site I'm liking to, I'm not getting anything in return for the links here, etc." so I figured I'd bring this here for outside opinions so as to assure that it doesn't appear like this is a one user crusade against his website. There are [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.beyonddc.com 6 other links] to the site as I post this and all seem decently legit ( Corridor Cities Transitway might warrant further investigation as Jdmalouff wrote that article though). Can I have some outside views? Metros232 04:22, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Is it considered spam to leave a friendly message on another User's talk page, pointing them to a blog review that discusses a new MediaWiki-based product/service that welcomes something that the Wikipedia User in question has been reprimanded for doing on Wikipedia? So as not to be vague, I am talking about a case where a User may have created a Category that is then deleted from Wikipedia, but this Category would have been welcomed at another off-Wikipedia wiki, such as in this case. I am willing to abide by the community consensus, but I don't appreciate that someone has already made this judgment and REMOVED my comments from other Users' talk pages. It's practically stalking.
Before you jump on the "Of course you are spamming, JossBuckle" bandwagon... please consider that Jimbo's Wikia project is very frequently cited as a recommended alternative to users who are building out Wikipedia in ways that are not considered helpful to the encyclopedia (e.g., with unduly detailed fancruft pages). Examples of this happening can be found here, here, and here. Before you comment that what I have done is unacceptable, ask yourself if it is not also unacceptable to promote Wikia as a preferred alternative to Wikipedia? Is Wikia the "official" external wiki worthy of spam-tolerance? Should Wikia.com be threatened with a permanent blacklist block, as has Centiare?
Please, Wikipedia community. It is getting downright embarrassing how you're enforcing certain rules while turning a blind eye to their gross violation elsewhere. Please respond here with your opinions about this concern of mine. -- JossBuckle Swami 13:54, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
JossBuckle Swami--Asside from campaigning and Canvassing for contributions, aparently now Votestacking, please cease this behavior. see [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16]-- Hu12 21:17, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
How about this, everyone? Before there's a complete witch hunt to discover where JossBuckle lives and who he dated in high school, answer this question:
If there's a Wikipedia user whose Category is headed for deletion, would it be okay to leave a message on his/her Talk page, which says the following:
I noticed that the Category you created, "Foo that are Bar", is likely headed for deletion. I understand that categories like this take quite some time to develop and flesh out, yet this particular one appears to be unwelcome at Wikipedia. I hope that you will continue your work here at Wikipedia. However, just so you know, there are also other wikis out there that might very well welcome such a Category project as yours. You might start by looking at Wikia.com, Centiare.com, or PBwiki.com. Note: no actual hyperlinks, to minimize spamminess.
Would that be considered spam? The reason I'm interested in doing this, is because Category deletionism has been rampant recently, and a lot of talented Wikipedians are having their feelings hurt. Letting them know that their industry and talent might be welcome in another place is showing some more kindness than just deleting their Category. I would like to include Centiare.com, because I was very impressed with the write-up about it that Scott Baradell offered in his blog last week. I am not like other Wikipedians who think that Wikia.com is the only external alternative wiki that should ever be mentioned in Wikipedia, because that's endorsing a severe conflict of interest that Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley have. -- JossBuckle Swami 13:45, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm not certain if this article was already discussed, but it appears to be a magnet for ELs ranging from commercial websites, blogs, forums, non-English, POV, etc. 4 pages broken into 10 categories. Even citations appear to be piggy-backed with commercial links. It gets to a point where the really good ELs simply get smothered with opinion or spam. Not sure where to start, but I'm inclined to clean out the EL section completely and put a warning up to spammers. Since this is a controversial topic, I'd like other opinions here first. Thanks! Calltech 17:10, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
There are currently 50 articles with external links to this site. Mattw13 ( talk · contribs), who is an SPA, has added most of them. Jgarbis ( talk · contribs), another SPA, has added some. I'm still looking for other accounts adding these links. Many of the links are labeled 'official'. I'm going to block the accounts, and start cleaning up the links. -- Donald Albury 17:37, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Tanned, rested and ready after a one week manadatory editing break earlier this month, 81.97.107.117 ( talk • contribs • page moves • block user • block log) is back at it again. For background, see:
I have no time to deal with this -- can the next shift handle? Thanks, -- A. B. (talk) 03:29, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
[en.wikipedia.org/?title=Information_and_Communication_Technologies_for_Development&diff=next&oldid=92716138 This edit] on a page I watch has me confused. The addition: Low cost computer guide doesn't have the arrow image indicating it's external and it's also written like a wikilink ([[Appropedia:Low cost computer guide|Low cost computer guide]]). But it is the color of an external link and if you click on it it takes you to www.appropedia.org/index.php?title=Low_cost_computer_guide. Appropedia is a Wiki run on mediawiki software but doesn't appear to be affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation. It's new to me. Has anyone seen this before? Will it work for any external site (and how?), any ideas how we would search for links that had been added in this manner? -- Siobhan Hansa 15:02, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Holy $#%&! We've got Wikimedia-wide "custom namespaces" for external links!? And they don't turn up in searches? Any distinction between internal and external sites is completely blurred. A
YouTube: namespace! On the same level with the
commons:? What do we have templates for? Separate templates for external links are evil enough. That's the most useless and dangerous "feature" ever. Are they #@&% nuts? [What are they thinking?]
Femto 16:54, 2 January 2007 (UTC), 11:57, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
I have run across jqjacobs.net links before and let them go as being relatively harmless. Yesterday a single IP added added links to 20+ articles, sometimes adding multiple entries to a single article. I have reverted all of those insertions. I would like a second opinion about removal from the remaining 100 articles. If you do some checking, yesterday's prolific spammer would often change "External links" to "External Links", change third-level E-L subsections to second level, or add a new "Placemarks" section. I suggest that any edits that fit this pattern can be removed as being from the same spammer. ✤ JonHarder talk 15:34, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
thismatter.com Looks like an adsense scrapper site (MFA). doesn't seem to have any other purpose ecept to catch page views. even the contact info for the site states Be sure to include the words no spam in the subject. If you do not include the words, the email will be deleted automatically.-- Hu12 02:56, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Follow-up: brief discussion with him on his user talk page - recognizes that they are self-links but feels he is entitled to them (which makes me somewhat less sympathetic to his case - especially since he mentions the importance of revenue from ads.) Here's the [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.thismatter.com|list of articles] that link to .thismatter.com. Of these, many contain non-neutral promotion using the same "concise article about ..." format (see: Taskbar, Criticisms_of_electoralism, Bond_(finance), Futures_contract, Mutual_fund_fees_and_expenses, Russell_Indexes, Investment_banking, Investment_banking, and Security_(finance). Nposs 19:14, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
I find the site owner's rationale for ignoring the Conflict of Interest guideline to be entirely unpersuasive. Basically, they feel like certain finance articles suck, but instead of taking the time to improve them, it would be easier to link to their own, better article, where they can be compensated with ad revenue for doing us such a big favor. Last time I checked, Wikipedia has been doing just fine with the efforts of over three million unpaid volunteers.
But even overlooking the significant COI violations, [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Linksearch&target=%2A.thismatter.com the links] also violate WP:EL's prohibition against "sites with objectionable amounts of advertising." I have begun reviewing and removing them, but would appreciate further assistance. -- Satori Son 20:37, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
The links in other articles may not have been placed there by Wcspaulding but that doesn't mean they were good faith edits. 67.76.153.37 placed quite a few and those were his/her only edits...which is definitely linkspamming. IrishGuy talk 20:57, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Was just made aware Sinned ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) is vandalizing EL sections and leaving edit summaries stating helping Hu12 remove "spam"!. Only contact with this person is removig his spam campain for powdermill-snowmobile-club.com see User talk:Sinned. Any advice, or help would be appreciated.-- Hu12 04:26, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
I wasn't aware of the specifics of Wikipedia's spam policies until Hu12 gave me a warning. I got the impression from the large number of commercial links on the articles for pages of towns/cities in New Hampshire, as well as some towns in Ontario I was looking at, that it was acceptable to add links to local recreational clubs to articles for towns/cities. -- Sinned 11:52, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Sinned ( talk · contribs) has been removing external links that are used as references. I noticed this on the Hampton Beach article. While the links did not necessarily back up the assertions to the article, inclusion of inline references should be assumed as good faith. Because editing an article to include refs can be time consuming, it may be more advisable to place a notice on an article's talk page that some of the refs may not be appropriate rather than arbitrarily removing them and leaving it to the article's regular editors to clean up the mess. Also, on first appearance looking at the contribs, this does smack as WP:POINT, but I'll assume good faith for now. — Malber ( talk • contribs) 18:13, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
]
On the English Wikipedia, and on others, spam is (obviously) becoming an increasing problem. The purpose of this essay is to propose a few ways to fight spam on a multiwiki, foundational level. While trying to keep it broad, there is some excellent specific stuff that is there that isn't here and vise versa; I'd encourage the editors here to skip over to the meta essay and add their expertise. JoeSmack Talk 00:21, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I've been reverting a lot of spam from www.aim-search.com today. For example, see [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Pornography&diff=prev&oldid=98314667 pornography], [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Sildenafil&diff=prev&oldid=98311667 Sildenafil], [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Phentermine&diff=prev&oldid=98302546 Phentermine], [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Tramadol&diff=prev&oldid=98302763 Tramadol]. As far as I can see there isn't much value in this "search eninge" beyond acting as a spam portal. Thoughts on whether this is a good candidate for the spam blacklist? Gwernol 01:55, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Many of you have probably seen this – it was first posted back in April 2006 – but blogger Peter T. Davis' first person account of Wikipedia link spamming, entitled [www.petertdavis.net/176-wikipedia-and-link-spammers-a-how-to-guide/ "'How-to' Guide for Link Spammers"], is still an interesting read. It was really being tossed around there for a while, partially reprinted as "How To Link Spam Wikipedia" both by [www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3240 Search Engine Journal] and [www.lockergnome.com/nexus/search/2006/04/10/how-to-link-spam-wikipedia/ Search Engineer], among others. And spammers have gotten even savvier since then, so we really need to be on our toes. -- Satori Son 01:59, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Time to stir the pot, but Angela makes me do it. It was interesting to see (yet again) Angela Beesley "marketing" the services of Wikia.com to the Wikipedia community, this time through the [mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l WikiEN-l mailing list] which is sponsored on Wikimedia servers that we users pay for with tax-deductible donations:
So, it's okay to "suggest" to other users a "more suitable wiki", especially if it's Wikia, which will put more Google ad revenues into Angela's pocket. Nobody else sees this as shameful? Just a few minutes later, another robotic Wikipedian responded, "Maybe there should be some way to mark the articles which are not notable for wikipedia, but are worthy to be included in internet.wikia.com. For example, one would include 'I7W' (non-notable website) as reason for deletion and a bot would monitor the deletion log and take the deleted articles marked that way and automatically post them on internet Wikia."
Jesus Christ, should we just make a "bot" that will transfer from every dollar donated to Wikimedia Foundation, one nickel into Angela's pocket, and a dime into Jimbo's? This is getting completely out of hand! -- JossBuckle Swami 03:41, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I would like an opinion on www.mymetar.com which contains four google ads per page. It is currently in a few articles including the METAR one and a template that is not being used. It provides weather for airports around the world and would be useful in airport articles. It's almost impossible to link to the individual weather station using the countries weather service. I would like to see the template used but I'm too close to the subject to see if its spam or not. Thanks. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 12:46, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Plbman (
talk ·
contribs ·
deleted contribs ·
nuke contribs ·
logs ·
filter log ·
block user ·
block log)
repositories.cdlib.org
I guess "working for the public good' include spamming hundreds of links.
User_talk:FisherQueen#Regarding_External_Link_I_added_to_an_online_book_on_the_historical_status_of_the_Klamath_River_salmon_fishery and
User_talk:Plbman#Reply_to_your_request
--
Hu12 02:27, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam/2006 Archive Dec#“powered by EJRS.com”. These links [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Ejrs started returning] today. -- A. B. (talk) 05:56, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
It's a fairly minor issue, but I've been dueling with anonymous SPA's for over four months trying to keep the Jerky (food) article free of spam links. The latest sockpuppet is 65.102.75.12 ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log), and their first edit was revert substituting a decent NASA inline citation with a link to a commercial website that sells beef jerky. If one or two of you could stick it on your watchlist I would really appreciate the help. Thanks, Satori Son 17:43, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
1911encyclopedia.org 1151 links & owned by LoveToKnow [www.1911encyclopedia.org/LoveToKnow_1911:About About LoveToKnow]
lovetoknow.com 38 links & owned by LoveToKnow [www.lovetoknow.com/about-lovetoknow.htm About LoveToKnow]
britannica.com holly cow! I stopped countng after 46 thousand links [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Linksearch&limit=500&offset=46500&target=%2A.britannica.com]
thecanadianencyclopedia.com 811 links Canadian Encyclopedia
I'm sure others have see these. I don't se a reason why Wikipedia should be external linking to other duplicate wikis. is there a policy specific to this? I'm inclined to remove them all.-- Hu12 06:31, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
Please take a look at the links in this article: several of them are commercial, but other editors keep restoring them to the article when I remove them, calling the removal vandalism. Thanks. A Ramachandran 15:15, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
Promotional site for the dancer Medha Hari:
Can others look at these and see if they should be deleted? I think they probably should, but additional neutral opinions and help would be welcome. Thanks, -- A. B. (talk) 13:32, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
the external links section of Net_neutrality needs a cleaning badly. i'm afraid i haven't been following the issue, so I am of less help as it is full of "papers" and "experts" etc. (notice the quotes). JoeSmack Talk 17:23, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
One to watch User:Wrathoffoamy is persistent in trying to advertise his/her business in Origami. I've gotta quit for tonight... Thanks. Pollinator 07:51, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Stumbled on this when Kkong ( talk · contribs · logs · block log) posted a link to an article I watch. Turns out all his edits aare to promote these websites:
These are wikis with a low number of users so inappropriate as external links even if they weren't being spammed.
They are all registered to the same person and all use the same google ad client number (and they are all plastered in google ads): pub-0064587396664963
Other IPs occassionally post a batch of links:
More detail can be found at: User:SiobhanHansa/Checks#lifestylewiki.com_airline-wiki.com_chinese-wiki.com
That seems to be it from the trail I have. I would recommend to the blacklist but I haven't had much luck with the recommendations I've made so I think I'm unclear on the guidelines. Other opinions? -- Siobhan Hansa 18:25, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Ragnarev ( talk · contribs) has been slowly been adding links to his own sites over the past several months: esbanquethallga.com, rayvan.net (1 link remaining), ameritech-elevator.com, lees-estate.com (1 link remaining), warspawn.com (1 link remaining) and ragnarev.com. A whois search reveal they are all registered to the same person. The links have mostly been removed by alert editors; unfortunately no one has yet warned him.
Office complex and Banquet hall were created solely as a vehicle for link spam. The articles are not that great. Is there something they can be redirected to?
Today we learned Ragnarev has a [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Talk:Internet_cafe&curid=1009877&diff=99181567&oldid=97439990 right to link to his own site]. We need a creative warning for this spam-only account! ✤ JonHarder talk 23:28, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
This site is [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.project80s.com spammed all over]. The site itself has pretty much no content. Just a cast list for shows and a brief blurb, often times taken from Wikipedia itself. It has advertising all over the place which appears to be its reason for existing. It is going to take me a while to pull all these links out of articles. Anyone want to assist? IrishGuy talk 00:03, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Not sure about this one since I don't see the immediate benefit to the spammer - maybe just driving up page hits. The action is very spammy ([en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.lifeinneurosurgery.com list]): the user has added multiple links to the website from multiple articles even including the link in See Also sections. The content of the pages linked is very thin, not really worth linking (even if it didn't violate WP:COI). With the bad experiences had by well meaning editors, I thought I'd draw your attention to it and get some feedback before taking action. Nposs 02:21, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
He's back as User:Neurosurgery - Special:Contributions/Neurosurgery (only one link so far.)
Seen while cleaning up other links:
Take the Muskellunge article (about a fish). Here's the link that was there:
Tell me how this advances any readers understanding of muskies, their biology or how you catch them. I submit that even the underwater-dock-lights spammer's stuff is more useful to the reader: underwater-dock-lights.com (That is not an endorsement of underwater-dock-lights, however). -- A. B. (talk) 02:30, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I added a new "Removal how-to" section on the main project page. This is intended to be a basic step-by-step guide for beginners. Each step increases in complexity; an editor can choose to stop anywhere in the progression. My idea is to make it as basic as possible for someone who is interested in helping but isn't sure of the process. How can it be improved? I think changes that simplify would be better than trying to add every possible nuance and special case.
I think the lead of the main page could be trimmed or parts of it moved farther down. The new material duplicates material that follows. This can be cleaned up once there is a consensus that the how-to is appropriate and stable. ✤ JonHarder talk 02:42, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
This is an ongoing problem what no one seems to be willing to either intervene in or investigate. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=libsyn.com&fulltext=Search Libsyn.com] in particular seems to be using it's 300+ imbedded links throughout Wikpedia as it's most effective free advertising source, as well as [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=www.otrsite.com&fulltext=Search www.otrsite.com] and [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=www.freeotrshows.com&fulltext=Search www.freeotrshows.com]. I realize this is only 400+ articles out of hundreds of thousands, but they're pretty representative of the further problem. The fact that no one seems to be responding to any of these larger scale link spam abuses over the past 9 months smacks of either some sort of 'convenient' overlooking of the problem, or perhaps even worse, no effective guidelines for resolving link spam abuse within Wikipedia. Any further assistance or more effective strategies or guidelines--including kicking this problem up the Wikipedia hierarchy if necessary--would be greatly appreciated. 76.170.239.56 21:23, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
While on the subject of deciding, I found another website offering "free" downloads of OTR shows that should be considered as well www.radiolovers.com ([en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.radiolovers.com%2F *.radiolovers.com]). It seems these websites believe that the copyright has expired on the shows. At the same time both radiolovers and freeotrshows.com feature ads. Nposs 22:27, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I have been going back and forth between another company who is up-front about wanting to expand their article with factual information. To me the conflict of interest guideline is clear: one should not edit articles related to their organization, but should feel free to make suggestions on the talk page. The Arbitration Committee consistently rules against those who ignore this guideline (they tend to get long blocks or bans in conflict situations). Can these conflict of interest edits be continually reverted as we do spam and vandalism? If so, what incentive does an employee have to be transparent about who they represent and make suggestion only on the talk page, supply useful images, etc? Is it preferable to allow some known COI editing over the usual sneaky stuff we deal with every day?
My current case deals with Extreme Networks, their corporate IP 207.179.9.4 ( talk · contribs) (sometimes used by Jennifer) and another employee Edchao ( talk · contribs). Our interactions have always been professional, respectful and courteous. What follows is copy our discussion from my talk page plus my latest response. I will encourage them to follow up here also. Any suggestions would be helpful, particularly about my conclusion below that their recent addition with many product links needs to be reverted again. ✤ JonHarder talk 03:09, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi, I just noticed that someone had deleted the entries that I made yesterday regarding information about Extreme Networks. Is there some rules that I violated? Please let me know so I came make the proper edits to comply.
Thanks, Ed — Preceding unsigned comment added by Edchao ( talk • contribs) 19:40, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Please take a look at the links in this article: several of them are commercial, but Marceo keeps restoring them to the article when I remove them, saying they address shortcomings in the article. Thanks. A Ramachandran 05:30, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
seems JumpTV has turned into a directory/ channel list. Not sure if somone wants to have a look.-- Hu12 05:38, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
The JumpTV article has turned into a link repository that also contains an excess of advertising language. Concerns have already been raised on the talk page, where I have commented as well, so I have removed the entire "Channel list" section. -- Satori Son 20:59, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Seen while catching up on my reading last night:[forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=210074&highlight=Wikipedia]
There are numerous links to web sites affiliated with this organization and its webmaster.[forums.digitalpoint.com/member.php?u=50538] [forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=2041351&postcount=16]
"NICOclub's Nissan forums and Infiniti forums and all affiliated sites are the property of HDS Holdings, LLC. They are independent publications and are not affiliated with or endorsed by Nissan Motor Company or Nissan North America."
Domains involved (probably not a complete list):
Affiliate sites not linked:
Editors adding these links (probably not a complete list)
I doubt I'll have time to clean these up and warn people. Can I leave this to the next shift? Thanks, -- A. B. (talk) 00:15, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Site:
Accounts[forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=2043158&postcount=24] [forums.digitalpoint.com/member.php?u=46310] adding these links:
-- A. B. (talk) 00:45, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
From my morning reading (registration required/discretion advised)[www.syndk8.net/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=7543] [www.syndk8.net/forum/index.php/topic,3970.msg82076.html#msg82076]
Sites linked:
Accounts involved:
-- A. B. (talk) 02:15, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
-- A. B. (talk) 05:21, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
-- A. B. (talk) 05:49, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
-- A. B. (talk) 06:34, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Today's meltdown [en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=prev&oldid=99734005],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99734055&oldid=99734005],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99734106&oldid=99734055],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99734291&oldid=99734106],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99735732&oldid=99734291],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99735953&oldid=99735732],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99736054&oldid=99735953],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99737064&oldid=99736054],[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:71.201.181.10&diff=99737100&oldid=99737064] of a spammer who finally read his warnings:
... leads to an observation that we have a number of articles dealing with this topic. Some are redundant, some are well-maintained and some are spam-bait. I don't have time to go over this stuff, but I did compile a list of articles:
The British certification articles seem to be better policed and more encyclopedic.
If you get the chance, please put these on your watchlists and consider cleaning them up (both spam and POV). -- A. B. (talk) 14:56, 10 January 2007 (UTC) (Status updated -- A. B. (talk) 18:18, 11 January 2007 (UTC))
User:208.100.136.104 spammed several articles with a link to the quasi-governmental (?) Central Oregon Visitors Association. A while back someone spammed every city in Lane County, Oregon with a similar link to that county's visitors bureau and I removed them all except the one in the actual county article. For some reason I'm having trouble deciding if I should nuke this Central Oregon link as well. I think I'm much too relaxed after taking a nice long wikibreak, so if someone else could take a look I'd appreciate it. Thanks! Katr67 21:40, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks everyone. I guess I got tired of being the heavy--it's good to get some backup in case the spammer argues. As wonderful as our fine state is, I really wish the spammers would stop trying to get people to come here--this kind of thing happens far too often. Katr67 03:43, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Would this and this bu User:Jrnetwork count as some sort of this an elaborate spam attempt? -- Peta 07:00, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi, I've had this request from the owner of these sites. I'm not sure how I ought to respond. I'm loath to take away the resource I have for ensuring these links do not get spammed again. But I also don't want to cause difficulties for a site that has mended it's ways - or cause unnecessary drama by being obstinate when there's an easy way to deal with it. Has anyone addressed this before? -- Siobhan Hansa 19:49, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
On a hunch (as A. B. has been suggesting) I checked on a minor spammer and found him to be a bigger problem on the French version. However, what interested me more was a sentence in the French warning template that rings true and perhaps we should open for discussion for inclusion in our templates and applicable guidelines. It says something like:
Francophones will have to correct me and suggest the best word to use at the end of the sentence. I like the idea of steering people away from adding only links to articles. Most of the time it is a sure tip-off of a spammer. We may as well just come out and say what we are thinking. Thoughts? ✤ JonHarder talk 23:25, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
OK, suppose we add these sentences to the respective templates:
I will propose it at Template talk:Spam and see what other responses there might be. ✤ JonHarder talk 02:09, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
the external links section of U.S._Route_66 needs cleaning. JoeSmack Talk 03:56, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
adsense account pub-9291737033108347, heres the list (I'm sure there is more).
-- Hu12 07:17, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
More .in spam for the record (pub-5012027703930414):
coimbatore.net.in bareilly.in bhatpara.in bhiwandi.in bijapur.in faridabad.net.in indore.net.in jabalpur.net.in ludhiana.net.in mirabhayander.co.in Nanded.co.in patna.net.in pimpri.in saharanpur.co.in Thiruvananthapuram.co.in varanasi.net.in Visakhapatnam.net.in dengue.in rbi.in ioi.in inforum.in Nposs 18:40, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
All the 3500 links have gone now anyway. Template spamming was done yesterday so well spotted. -- BozMo talk 11:06, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for cleaning that up. The previous event was [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive146#Amazon_affiliate_spam here]. I will try and get the Russian sites blacklisted at meta, and I suspect the spammer was using proxies to get around the range block - I will see if we can get them blocked. The backlinks to the astore.amazon.com domain need to be closely watched, and I say again, I don't think they have any place here.
I am not sure how to prevent this occurring again. What we need is a list of templates with external links. Another option is semi-protection for stub templates. -- zzuuzz (talk) 00:34, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Just seen at m:Talk:Spam blacklist#wichm sites -- spammer hitting across multiple language versions:
Assuming he gets blacklisted, we still need to go back and delete those links or else folks will have trouble editing the various articles. I'm away for a while, so count me out. -- A. B. (talk) 14:13, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Well, I couldn't delete the Subud one because another link on the page is already BL blocking edits. How can I find which? -- BozMo talk 14:42, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Already got a protest because the link has genuine content on it. However the content seems to have been ripped off from www.caic.org.au/general/psymove.htm . -- BozMo talk 14:54, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
However some of the content appears to be unique original and of some value: e.g. www.xs4(broken so I can save the page)all.nl/~wichm/myth.html . Hmm. Not an obvious blacklist one to me. -- BozMo talk 15:01, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Contributions consist soley of spamming articles with citations from these "related" sites.
Mergneed (
talk ·
contribs ·
deleted contribs ·
nuke contribs ·
logs ·
filter log ·
block user ·
block log)
Adsense pub-4706226669145133
--
Hu12 14:29, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
All sites are registered to Touch Group Plc
Advanced Web search optimisation techniques [www.touchgroupplc.com/dyncat.cfm?catid=537]
-- Hu12 01:10, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
see Wikipedia:Requests_for_checkuser/Case/Sselvakumar -- BozMo talk 22:12, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
The combination of Aliweb, Talk:Aliweb, and User:Aliweb ( talk) ( contribs) defy WP:OWN and WP:COI policies and fit Wikipedia:Spam#Advertisements masquerading as articles like a glove.
I'm uninvolved, merely taken a look at the situation once in awhile since mid-December. I'm too new a registrant (three months) to feel easy about slapping on the {{db-spam}}, and the attitude and persistent reversions of the self-appointed 'owner' lead me to expect he'll remove the tag a lot faster than he'll add a {{hangon}}. And, too, dropping it into CAT:SPEEDY & CAT:SPAM may simply delay a real WP:AFD. Please advise. Athænara ✉ 12:05, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
I posted it on Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard with the section heading "[[Aliweb]] {{coi-links|Aliweb}}" as is standard there. At least six anonymous IPs (employee(s) and/or owner(s) of a commercial website); diffs/contribs dissected. Athænara ✉ 13:26, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
"A wildcard may be used, at the start of the name only, for example "*.wikipedia.org". "
AFAIK, no. -- BozMo talk 14:18, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Anyone remember this discussion (Not so much spam as promotion) ? Anyway its back with category pages see: Category:Woodstock Category:Woodstock (1969) Performers etc etc. -- BozMo talk 14:18, 15 January 2007 (UTC) mainly User:Neanderthalprimadonna and user:PAK_Man. We now have a page per year see Woodstock '94 etc. Hmm... -- BozMo talk 14:22, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
I recently came across this editor, and wondered if his/her multiple insertions of the same link across articles would qualify as spam. The link itself is not commercial, AFAICT, but the articles linked to provide little extra info. Thoughts? IronDuke 16:28, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
IP addresses continue to add commercial linkspam to truffle articles, especially links to PlantationSystems.com in Tuber (genus). Truffles are a very high profit niche in both online sales and CPC advertising. Sinned 18:27, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
User appears to have placed 83 links to her site. See [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.katinkahesselink.net]. The user is clearly Katrina Hesse. She states that the site is hers on her user page. A Ramachandran 22:51, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
So now there is a rv war going on between Wjhonson and some other editors. Wjhonson is suggesting that editors need to justify every link removal on the article talk page. This seems like a bad precedent. The burden should be on the person who has provided the link. Here are the problems: 1) The user added many of the links herself - WP:COI 2) The user has admitted that she makes a portion of her income from the advertising on her website. Actually, to me, this on its own wouldn't necessarily mean the links should be removed - especially since some of the links provide good additional content and enrich the article. The problem is 3) There are way too many links to her website. Sometimes two or more on a single article. That (to me) makes it linkspam. A selective reduction of these links and a conversation with the user about WP:COI is definitely appropriate. Nposs 20:33, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Both sites are exactly the same and both appear to be complete ripoffs of britannica.com. Then I looked closer... In Henri La Fontaine nobel-winners.com was used as a source.... in 2003.[en.wikipedia.org/?title=Henri_La_Fontaine&diff=1461838&oldid=1461834] nobel-winners.com has a note that all content is released under GFDL... Not I gotta think again... it is possible that britannica.com ripped them off? If someone knows more about this, advise would be appreciated. --- J.S ( T/ C/ WRE) 03:14, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Mistook him for a vandal at first, but it appears to be an author using WP to promote his website and books. I tried to warn him about WP:COI, but he has subsequently created a page about himself ( Andras_M._Nagy) that serves only to list his books. Not exactly sure how to handle the situation. Suggestions? (Some of the links he has added to his own website contain content that might be worth linking - so I haven't deleted all of them.) Nposs 20:02, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the help everybody. Nposs 00:23, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Wisdomking (
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Adsense pub-6534719876029376
emzr.com
bollywoodpoint.com
Uday4ru (
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I thought this amusing--
Hu12 23:13, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Hey, I'm not sure how to proceed, or rather, proceed further. For some time, someone has been adding to the Anchored Cross article "see also Anchored Cross (band)", a myspace page.
I'll start from the beginning; I first started clearing out the neo-classical metal list, removing red links and spam, and others not even related to it. There was one myspace linkspam; of course, an anonymous user wrote an insult on my talk page, and vandalised my page.
They then added the link on the Anchored Cross article. Since the anonymous user seemed determined, I changed it from an external link, to a red wiki link. Another user then removed the link altogether, which I agree with. The page has never been made, and I doubt it would pass notability to be included regardless.
However, for a while now, an anonymous user has readded it over and over again. If you check the page's history, you can see it's been going on since the end of November. Given the constant spam by a similar IP address, and obviously never listening, I am unsure how to proceed.
I'm rather annoyed, and would rather not have that link on Wikipedia even for a minute until someone removes it, however I don't believe that's feasible. What can I do? I'm not new to Wikipedia, but all I've ever done is edit articles, never done anything more, so I don't know what to do. Any help please? --Dayn 07:18, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
The Long Tail appears to be a useful article, and many of us have heard of the general idea, but its 'External links' section is filling up with cruft. I recently deleted a slide presentation from a search-engine optimization company [en.wikipedia.org/?title=The_Long_Tail&diff=prev&oldid=101250141] and got this response on my User_talk:
Does anyone have general advice on how to protect the page? I watch RSS (file format) and that page has an enthusiastic crew of spam-deleters, but The Long Tail seems bereft of a protective community. Any advice? EdJohnston 22:43, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Professorgupta (
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Adsense pub-3279714273926761
These are trickier because they contain actual player stats not on WP: anyone got an alternative source? -- BozMo talk 10:23, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
done -- BozMo talk 10:23, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
done -- BozMo talk 10:23, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
done by someone -- BozMo talk 10:45, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
done plus/or AFDed the linkbait articles these hung off
Clear - looks like this was cleaned up. --- J.S ( T/ C/ WRE) 17:04, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
No doubt this is the future of spam. citations and reference are being abused constantly. By all accounts the edits, and edit summaries seemmed legit, however on closer examination it was spamming on a huge scale. this is only one persons contribs, can't even begin to speculate how much more from this publisher is still out there. Now for the cleanup-- Hu12 23:00, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
The circle widens: I was surprised that many of the links above were registered by a single user in the Whois information. Well, that person is also the head of [www.seoforsports.com/contact.html SEO for sports], the organization behind the sports link spamming SEO operation. Blacklist 'em. Nposs 04:47, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
List of virtually contentless artciles added by User:Professorgupta featuring links to the user's websites or inter-wiki links to articles with links to websites:
those four I found and AfDed because realising you had listed them-- BozMo talk 10:47, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
I have AfDed the above. The below someone else can do. -- BozMo talk 11:15, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Most of these seem like good candidates for AfD. Nposs 05:34, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
We don't delete articles simply because of who started them. We delete articles for being unverifiable, for being original research, or for not satisfying our relevant notability criteria. Please don't nominate articles for deletion simply because a particular editor started them. Nominate them only if they contravene our policies. Bad articles on notable subjects should be cleaned up, not deleted. AFD is not the only tool in the toolbox. Uncle G 11:55, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Careful please! Cleaning up I established that crazysportsfan.com was the only listed source for player stats and people will complain. Can we find an alternative or remove that one from the blacklist??--
BozMo
talk 19:16, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Another two sites on WP which cross link with the above are onlypunjab.com and icudatingcams.com. I will have a quick look at who added the links to them when I have some time -- BozMo talk 20:49, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Does anyone have some insight into this situation:
I just finished going through and double-checking all of the link searches in the last talk archive, and it looks like these spam links have flared up again:
I am not sure the digital dessert ones were ever taken out. I have removed all bar two of them but most seem to have been there continually since Oct 2005 when a few IPs put them in (none of whom were warned: doesn't seem much point now they've been cold for 18 months e.g. Special:Contributions/66.146.62.152 Special:Contributions/66.146.62.14 Special:Contributions/66.146.62.15 Special:Contributions/66.146.62.11 (link diverts to digital-dessert) Special:Contributions/66.146.62.16 (july 2006 to aeve.com, an affiliate)
--
BozMo
talk 09:25, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Add also affiliated site by the same spammers (which I have cleaned up for now) [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.mojavedesert.net mojavedesert.net]
Otherwise, our cleanup from last month looks pretty good. If anyone has time to help me remove these again, it would be greatly appreciated. -- Satori Son 17:24, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Some of you may already know [www.seoworldchampionship.com/contestrules.asp about this]. I've just started to see the first links to roll in [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Greenhouse_gas_inventory&diff=101669011&oldid=91785528] [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Awareness&diff=101691321&oldid=101671692] [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Awareness&diff=101529468&oldid=101441603]. Perhaps there is more I haven't found. I won't repeat the secret phrase here, but is there any way to guard against this type of vandalism? The contest lasts until May 1. I know the contest is not new. Are there lessons learned from past years? Nposs 08:19, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
thought I'd post this before its deleted Globalwarming awareness2007, we are certainly a target-- Hu12 00:31, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
-- Hu12 03:15, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
I have a partial list of domains involved in this contest on my user subpage at User:A. B./Sandbox10. Since this WikiProject Spam talk page was semi-protected a little earlier today, contestants' vandalism has shifted to that user subpage, culminating in the page just being blanked.[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User:A._B./Sandbox10&curid=9012982&action=history] Those IPs are probably worth evaluating as potential sources of further mischief unless they're dial-up modems. The ones I checked out were mostly DSL. There might also be an open proxy or two -- always worth bolcking. Also, the user contributions may indicate some additional domains being spammed.
Until the nofollow decision sinks in, I think we'll also see some Joe jobs -- highly visible, provocative spamming of one competitor's domain ... by another competitor hoping to get the first guy in trouble. My personal attitude is, that's OK, bring 'em on. None of these links belong here. Given the nature of all these links, I'm not going to lay awake at night worrying if some globalwarmingawareness2007 domain really "deserved" to be blacklisted or not.
I encourage admins to take advantage of WP:IAR in their handling of all of this. I don't think we need to go through a 5-warning sequence to establish that these people may not be editing in good faith.
Enjoy the show. I'll revert my user page so it can be attacked some more if you want; I don't mind it being used as a honeypot. It may be worthwhile to just put it on a watchlist and keep reverting it for the information it gives us. You don't have to semi-protect it; my versions are always available from the page history. -- A. B. (talk) 20:00, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure what all Globalwarming Awareness2007 ( talk · contribs) has been doing because I think some edits have been deleted, including the main user page, and not available in the contribs. What is going on with the last two contribs though?[en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:Globalwarming_Awareness2007&diff=prev&oldid=103902802][en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:Globalwarming_Awareness2007&diff=prev&oldid=103903163] He appears to still be gaming the system. ✤ JonHarder talk 21:30, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
The template Template:NoMoreLinks ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been proposed for deletion. See Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2007 January 19 to help reach a consensus on what to do. Mieciu K 14:00, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Anyone had a look at technorati.com for a while? I know it has some legit stuff but there are a lot of links from it to spammers crowing about spambaiting WP etc and it might be worth going through all the techy links to pages on it [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.technorati.com] shows 164 links but many are to non mainspace pages. -- BozMo talk 15:16, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
AJackl, not sure what to make of them, is he/she promoting something?-- Hu12 17:28, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Ok, there is a short list of some of the links this person has linked to. Every website seems to be independent entities. It appears to me that this user edits education related articles... more specifically Landmark Education related articles.
It doesnt appear to me that this user is acting in bad faith... Perhapse misguided, but not in bad faith. --- J.S ( T/ C/ WRE) 18:12, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Recently, I decided to make a program that would parse the logs from the linkwatcher bot in #wikipedia-spam on freenode and dump the logs to my userspace. Here are today's, and the archive goes back to around 7:00 PM UTC January 4, 2007.
What do you think? Veinor (talk to me) 21:46, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
following User:BozMo's lead on Special:Contributions/Zbd, how do we feel about [banglapedia.search.com.bd banglapedia.search.com.bd]? here is the web link search: [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.banglapedia.search.com.bd]. does this meet WP:RS (authoritative, verifiable)? it has some 600 links across bio articles, but it is a wiki with a long list of academic contributors (although i've certainly never heard of the site or the people). opinions? JoeSmack Talk 00:26, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
I went ahead and archived a bunch of this page... it was over 300 Kb of data! If there is anything that was still current, that I did by mistake, just copy it back out of the archive. ( here) Cheers! —— Eagle 101 ( Need help?) 00:28, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
Personally I find it hard to find things in the archives and whether they exist there. Does anyone else think that we should change to some type of AfD type structure where we archive each suspect group of sites on a subpage of the main page and have a transcluded list here of the currently active ones?
Apart from logic and ease there is a slightly odd other motive, which perhaps I shouldn't mention...it might also make it quicker to get some of the community here to the level of edits on Wikipedia which some people think is needed for a Sysop (as I am just finding out... not sure why)... as AB kindly just pointed out "... include Wikipedia Talk space since that's where most WikiProject Spam activity occurs (compare WP:WPSPAM vs. WT:WPSPAM -- I have no idea why it's that way.)" We can also close blacklist or perm block cases to clean things up. -- BozMo talk 10:15, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
At Jimbo Wales' directive, all external links within the English language Wikipedia are now coded "nofollow" -- this should help cut spamming immensely once word gets out in the SEO community.
This was mentioned in the discussion Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Globalwarming awareness2007/SEO world championship -- expect a spam onslaught.
You can check this out for yourself by having your browser display the source code (typically a menu bar command such as "View source code", "Source", or "Page source"); here's an example from the Bacteria article:
The MediaWiki software does this automatically when converting wiki-code to html to send to browsers. -- A. B. (talk) 15:37, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
I would like to point out that this doesn't mater, google gets to decide if they run this site with no follow or not. It would be trivial for google to add a line of code that says to follow wikipedia links regardless of nofollow, just as they may very well have been nofollowing our site for a while now. Google (and the other search engines) can do whatever they want with our site regardless of what we have codded in there. Just given the huge size of wikipedia alone, I can guarantee all of the major search engines have had custom ways of dealing with anything that comes out of this url. In all honesty this is out of our hands at this point. -- T- rex 17:36, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
It does little to control spam since 1) many spammers are too dumb to know it is turned on, 2) it takes a second to add a link so the traffic is worth the bother, 3) it might be turned off in the future so getting links in now when it is off will seem less spammy, and they will get a benefit in the future, 4) many spammers are dumb, did I mention that one? 2005 01:30, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
Very distressing! Wikipedia is one of the most legitimate forms of "link voting" to exist on the net. Any spammer can put up multiple web pages with links to wherever they want, but when a link survives for a significant amount of time on Wikipedia it actually means something. Wikipedia provides real value to the net in the way it affects search engine rankings. I hate this new policy and fervently hope we remove nofollow from Wikipedia links. Cos 03:51, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Can MediaWiki be arm-twisted to add the attribute in question only to the links contained in recent (for a certain definition of recent) edits? Once a link is part of the page long enough and survives enough edits by others, it is deemed "verified" and the attribute is not generated for it... пан Бостон-Київський 21:21, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Some effects of nofollow :) :
(1) Google will cache significantly fewer pages from mainspace. Hard to tell of course because the cache goes up and down with the cycle but there was a huge fall in google caching WP talk pages in May and there is a view that the "simplify dataset" part of Google's cycle (when it drops a load of "trivial" pages) is much more likely to drop pages with no external links.
(2) No noticable reduction in spam: still enough gains from actual traffic, links on mirrors and anchor text (which is probably still considered relevant even if nofollowed) and enough stupid spammers to make not noticable reduction.
(3) Editors and spammers are much more inclined to argue endlessly about spammy links claiming that as there is nofollow there is no downside in allowing them. Several Wikispam team members turn to drink (anyone for a sweepstake of who?), because of this and upset by being marked "must try harder" by Jimbo.
(4)Downward effect on WP growth curve with switch of traffic to static mirrors without nofollow (relief to WMF I suppose). Easy to test the later as I have an old advert-free (highly compliant) static mirror which gets about 20,000 Unique IPs a day. I reckon it will go up to 30,000 over about three months.
(6) Encyclopedia Britannica opens champagne.
(7) A litigant cites Jimbo's intervention as proof that the Foundation controls editorial content on WP and is therefore liable for it.
-- BozMo talk 21:13, 20 January 2007 (UTC).
comments and counter predictions
(1) They better, some of the stuff is junk.
(2) Not immediately, but over time. It will also not much reduce visible spam to articles (where the word "spam" is not appropriate anyway, because a lot of the spam is just "inappropriate" or not relevant enough to keep it). It will reduce a lot of the hidden spam that flies under the radar and is the stuff that "sticks" and making a mass spamming of the site all worthwhile. Remember, a link to a spammer site from an AUTHORITARIAN DOMAIN is much more worth if no human sees it, but the SE, because the SE give credit to it, humans would remove it.
(3) It's good to force some discussion that does not start with the argument that its only about the ranking. Some relevant resources were sometimes dismissed in the past because of this misconception which is a loss for wikipedia.
(4) Explain the thing a bit more. Why are the mirrors not ending up with NOFOLLOW in the links? They should have a "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW" in the Meta Tags for the start anyway, because it is obviously duplicate content that search engines should not pick up to begin with.
(5) Argument against it. NO FOLLOW on all links removes prejudices from the links that where included or excluded for the wrong reason. All links are NOW EQUAL and unbiased. Search engines have to fix their system and figure out which links are relevant and which not. I hope that other authority sites will follow, because Search Engines will be forced to come up with better solutions that this NO FOLLOW crap that added more mistrust to the Internet community than anything. Too much links with NO FOLLOW should be without it and a lot more links without it should have it. Since this does not going to work, set them all to the same. Humans will be able to tell the difference in most cases and don't care about hidden attributes. It's not our job to patch somebody else's broken algorithms.
(6) And maybe spammed to bits.. oh no.. they are not allowing the user to interact with them. Maybe we should do the same with Wikipedia... ahem... no.. let them drink and suffer from the hangover :)
(7) Response: No, Wikipedia decided not to continue to play the search engine's games that encourages mistrust between people, communities and sites created by the unintended abuse of the NOFOLLOW attribute by the SE to patch up some holes in a broken system they call ranking algorithm.
This will not play out within a few weeks, but months if not years, but less than 2 years IMO. -- roy<sac> Talk! .oOo. 10:42, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Worth keeping an eye on:
You see some good faith requests from neutral editors as well some other requests appealing the occasional big mistake. Then you see some of our old friends, usually with wonderful stories of their own self-reform or else some wrongdoing by a "rogue admin".[meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist#Middlesell][meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist/Archives/2007/01#I_hope_this_is_the_right_place][meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist#www.animals-pictures-dictionary.com][meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist#Sledtv.org]
Some times you even get a few leads from an IP or user name on Meta:
and similarly:
Given the number of links cleaned up, perhaps really not worth the 10 minutes I spent on it, but sort of satisfying just the same. -- A. B. (talk) 17:52, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
In the past couple of days I have noticed cases of double-linking to a site. In general the entry is like X/Y at X. My initial reaction is that this is unnecessarily promotional of the site. Since this pattern repeats over multiple articles, it is likely a small set of editors adding the links, but I haven't checked. A couple of examples to evaluate:
Thoughts? ✤ JonHarder talk 18:00, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
[www.example.com/example.php Example] at
Example.com
. external link followed by internal link. If no internal link exists, then we just link to it once. ---
J.S (
T/
C/
WRE) 18:22, 20 January 2007 (UTC)Sometimes this might be a legitimate thing by an editor who wishes to avoid deeplinking into a rapidly changing site (MS comes to mind), or into a site which asks not to deep-link (such as WoS) (in which case it is only appropriate to give an appropriate link to the home page, and maybe an intermediate subsection as well). Of course, my examples are probably not the best -- in the cases like MS or WoS, when the site is notable enough to have a well-deserved WP article on it, the mention of the site will not be an external link, but rather a wikilink. Finally, a possible instance of double linking in a similar way is within a cite... template, when one link points to an online version of a journal, and another points to a specific issue within it. I myself remember doing double linking of the sort when motivated by one of the aforementioned reasons. --DeathToSpamDeathToSpamDeathToSpam-- BACbKA 21:49, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar | ||
Awarded to WikiProject Spam and its voluntary members for defending Wikipedia against spam! -- Hu12 16:35, 21 January 2007 (UTC) |
Not sure if awards can be given to a project, but if so, this is overdue. The detication and determination of the project members here is amazing. It's a thankless task and The scope of the spam onslaught is ever increasing. My vote is to give this award to the project and its members, because the projects efforts improve the quality of Wikipedia.--
Hu12 16:35, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
User:66.241.87.171 is spamming animal welfare articles after I talked to him/her. I'm not sure the user saw my response to an earlier incident on my talk page, so I just copied it to his/her talk page. If I could get some backup that would be helpful. I also decided the link added to Jackson County, Oregon wasn't too out of line, but if someone removes it, I won't complain. The problem is, the links are being added to articles that are already link farms, so if I remove this person's spam, I'd have determine the legitimacy of dozens of other links. Thanks for checking it out. Katr67 16:47, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
I would like some input if [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=www.babblebooks.com these] would be considered spam (as in: to be removed). They are links to digital voice readings of mostly Project Gutenberg books, added by user:Anais9000. -- Van helsing 18:46, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
One correction: Babblebooks does not use Gutenberg etexts, due to their rampant inaccuracies. In fact, I am gradually correcting the corrupt Gutenberg texts at Wikisource.
Who can fail to be amused by your removal of the unabridged audio of 50 classics in the public domain, our common heritage -- because of your fear that they may lead to commerce? By this logic you should remove all references to universities, since education can induce mothers to purchase medical care for their children. -- Anais9000
The audio is free, in the sense that you don't have to pay for it. Costless. Available at no charge. (Except to me, since I pay for the vast bandwidth.) Streaming or non-DRM'd MP3s. But suit yourself. - Anais9000
I appreciate the suggestions. But I don't know what you mean by "proper" versions. There's nothing but digitally-voiced (DV) audio. There is no human audio, if that's what you mean by proper. And of course, the idea that the "main" purpose of the site is to make money is laughable. How much money do you think I make producing, at vast cost of time and effort, audio that most people can't believe is "proper". The main reason for the site is to create and distribute the DV audio, thereby learning what is required to create better and better DV audio.
This is why they're not placed in the public domain. Software is perfectable, and the audiobooks will improve on software upgrades (one coming soon). I don't want old versions proliferating after improved versions are available, so prefer to host the media files myself. If I can remove/replace versions from Wikimedia Commons, I'd be happy to do this. I'll look into it. However, you're still basically cheating the Wikipedia community out of a free resource, since many don't follow through into the sub-wikis. -- Anais9000
(No response.)
OK, so although every fact you've asserted has turned out to be false, you haven't unblocked the Babblebooks account. So today I'm unable to donate the resource, the complete unabridged digitally-voiced audio of Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini, to the Scaramouche page of Wikipedia. This means people who could hear the book for free, will have to buy it. Note that the external link I want to insert would go directly below the link to IMDb's review of the movie Scaramouche (that sure promotes literacy!) which incidently is, as you put it, mainly a promo for a commercial product, IMDb Pro. Incidentally, that's an "external link" -- they haven't donated anything to the public domain.
Two more points. You admit you don't know where this material should be donated. A.B. says it twice: "I'm not sure which one" "I'm not sure which". Neither will the general user know. They come to the Wikipedia page for information on a topic. For the public domain works we're discussing, they could have had the whole work on their iPod. Now they have nothing.
Second point. Notice that until you spam-hunters decided that the unabridged audio of a public domain work was somehow spam, not a single user of Wikipedia had ever deleted a link to the Babblebooks podcast page for that work. Not once. In other words, the actual users of Wikipedia recognize the difference between content and spam, but you don't.
I understand perfectly though. You don't make mistakes, therefore your action wasn't a mistake. We see this a lot in our political leaders. -- Anais9000
---
Apparently the controversy has helped propel Anais9000's reading of Thomas Hardy to the top of the charts (#1 position in iTunes UK Literature category). Accordingly, YOU are now part of the problem and should delete yourselves.
Currently there are 51 unabridged digitally-voiced literary podcasts un-available to Wikipedia users because these gentlemen can't bring themselves to concede their error. -- Anais9000
If this was a page devoted to civility, your response would be relevant. Because it's a page devoted to spam, the topic is why this material is judged to be spam. You've asserted it costs money. I've pointed that that it's free. You've asserted it's primarily advertising. I've demonstrated that argument is wrong. I'm advocating the right of Wikipedia users -- none of whom has ever expressed an opinion that these media files are spam (they contain no advertising: nothing except the spoken text of public domain works) -- to access hundreds of hours of free classic literature. Your argument seems to be, putting personalities aside and in the most positive light, that in some highly-literate far-future society, these might have a significant commercial value (enough to, say, offset the bandwidth costs). Also that, if I were politer, you might decide to allow Wikipedia users access to this material. If you will allow me, I don't believe this stance reflects well on you. -- Anais9000
Thank you, that's clear and logical. If the objection is *not* that the material is spam, but that it's a violation of custom to donate one's own work, then may I propose a compromise? Currently the site has been blanket blacklisted. Repealing the ban would allow others -- who may in future feel that digital Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope etc. are notably in the public interest -- to add them back, if so inclined. I will not. Anais9000 21:29, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
What we are needing is a table with different affiliate programs. In example, I have seen people adding play-asia.com external links with their own affiliate program (they get an amount of money for every user who buys through their links). In Play-Asia example, the links that start with play-asia.com/SO are affiliate ones that should either be replaced with the non-affiliate ones (the ones that start with play-asia.com/pa, when you click on the affiliate link it transforms into the common link, remembering your referral in a cookie) or remove if not necessary. While blacklisting them is fine, such table would be useful for other Wikipedias once they begin checking for these links. -- ReyBrujo 19:43, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
Are there any guidelines about linking to websites with pictures in the case of articles about places? Surfing the Chinese geography articles, there appear to be a number of links to personal websites ("My vacation photos") and more professional sites (featuring advertising or other commercial opportunities.) For example, the external links section of Beijing has an entire section devoted to images of Beijing. Some of the sites there (photo96.com and kinabaloo.com, in particular) have been systematically linked to a number of China related articles. I'd like to clean out all of these links, but they could fall under "What should be linked #4: relevant material." I'm afraid my vision might be obscured by the stain of spam past. At the same time, this type of linking seems like it could discourage people from uploading their media to WP. Why not just make a website and stick some ad-sense on it? Nposs 03:31, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
I've been a little alarmed by a "now we don't need the blacklist/whitelist" comment ref whitelists etc so I thought I would run a quick proposal through here:
1) We need the blacklist still (as do the other language WPs) so we need the existing whitelist for its specific purpose 2) So lets call a list of links which should not be "nofollowed" a GREENLIST 3) Lets get a sysop only or meta page page for a list of url stems to be greenlisted 4) To implement as no one likes playing with the code is create as a pseudolanguage greenlist.wikipedia.org under interwiki and for all greenlisted urls set a dynamic divert from for example greenlist.wikipedia.org/bbc.co.uk/* to bbc.co.uk/*. Google understands clean diverts.
Anyone who tries it on a link not on the greenlist just gets a 404. Thoughts? -- BozMo talk 10:47, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
]
Have a look at [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.lyricsdir.com this lot]. The vast majority must be copyvio links. Spam as well? Thanks, CiaranG 13:53, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Headed into a meeting. No time to handle. See:
-- A. B. (talk) 16:23, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Most of you probably know this, but today is the rollover date for the new user template messages as developed by the Wikipedia:WikiProject user warnings. The new warning templates for spamming are {{uw-spam1}}, {{uw-spam2}}, {{uw-spam3}}, and {{uw-spam4}}. The old templates will continue to redirect over for quite some time (that's one reason why the "uw" was added to the beginning of each). The full list of all new warning templates can be found at WP:UTM. -- Satori Son 20:37, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Forgive my ignorance, but I still can't figure out how to insert the user specific information that occurs in the first sentence of the template. I also can't find instructions anywhere, although I'm sure they exist. It might be nice to add them to the project page by the templates for the slower folks like me. Nposs 06:43, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
Congratulations to admin BozMo ( talk · contribs) for weathering the requests for adminship processes and coming through with a shiny new mop. Well done. Now run along and protect something. ✤ JonHarder talk 04:36, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
Quite a few links to [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.cardomain.com cardomain.com], even has an article CarDomain. Somehow manage to dodge 2 Afd's Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Www.cardomain.com and Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Cardomain. These are what links to [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=CarDomain this article]. Have a look at the anon contributors in the [en.wikipedia.org/?title=CarDomain&action=history history], most all are cardomain.com spammers. Any opinions on Cardomain.com's use of wikipedia?-- Hu12 04:49, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
Any views on [en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=*.rollingpapers.net this] one? All apparently inserted by the site's owner, and in some places used as a reference as well as an external link. Thanks. CiaranG 08:45, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
So I came across an account adding lots of links to the site doingbusiness.org - on looking into it I discovered that lots of IP addresses registered to the World Bank have been adding links to sites associated with the organization, along with similar behavior from a few other Virginia registered IP addresses and a couple of registered users.
Here's what I have so far: Websites related to the World Bank group:
IP addresses registered to the World Bank Group that have added these links and made virtually no other edits (that I have found so far):
I haven't checked all possible addresses since the World Bank Group has the entire 138.220.x.x range!
IP addresses/accounts not registered to World Bank Group with most edits apparently to add links to World Bank sites (that I have found so far):
This is just what I've discovered going through the doingbusiness.org links and seeing who added them. Most, though not all, were added by these accounts. I haven't gone through the other URLs systematically yet.
Of course this the World Bank is a good source for many articles and there are hundreds of appropriate links for these sites. Blacklisting is not appropriate. At the same time the World Bank does have an agenda and isn't considered entirely NPOV, especially in many non-US and European countries, so having their staff edit is a problem from an NPOV perspective as well as a spam one.
I was thinking of taking this to WP:ANI and asking for a range block of the World Bank IPs to stop them from editing, but it seems drastic. Any other solutions people can think of?
Also, I have doingbusiness.org virtually sorted out, but if anyone would like to help on research of the others it would be helpful. Since these are potentially useful sites, when I think it has been added as spam (except where the link seems outright inappropriate), I'll be moving it to the talk page asking for regular editors of the article to consider it's appropriateness. -- Siobhan Hansa 16:40, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
I have compiled a list of the articles with over 100 external links according to the latest database dump (November 30, 2006). There are currently 905 articles listed there (a few have been deleted). Note that templates generating external links like {{ coor d}} are considered external links in the database dump. The list is found at here. The full list is over 40mb, so I am uploading the ones with over 100 (which account for 258,885 out of 10,333,272, or 2.5% of the total external links I harvested). -- ReyBrujo 22:51, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
I have archived agian, The page was 239 Kb long. If I removed something that should not have been removed, just slap it back up here. Cheers! —— Eagle 101 ( Need help?) 01:57, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
I was talking with User:Toonarific when the subject of BCDB.com came up. I was wondering... what does it have that we can't just put on Wikipedia? It seems to mostly consist of episode guides. Veinor (talk to me) 02:49, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
I Don't know where to begin. uugh-- Hu12 04:34, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
This article has been PROD'd, deleted, recreated, PROD'd again, and then de_PROD'd. I hung a notability tag on it and spent a while trying to determine its notability. I wrote up my notes on the article talk page and received withering criticism from 208.30.173.194 ( talk • contribs • links • count • actions • logs || WHOIS • RDNS • traceroute • RBLs • tor • search):
During this process, I have come to believe this article is a form of corporate spam that should go to AfD. At the same time, I think it appropriate to ask here for neutral outside opinions, especially given the vitriol involved.
Note that there has also been inappropriate commercial linking from other articles to the carinsurance.com web sites from these accounts in the past:
Thanks for your help and advice, -- A. B. (talk) 04:41, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
Repeatedly spammed link to a site owned by DSB Worldwide:
Other DSB Worldwide sites:
Accounts adding this link
Meta acounts vandalizing m:Talk:Spam blacklist
Note the vandalism spree on
meta:Talk:Spam blacklist by one of these accounts,
24.119.101.26.
[19]
[20]
[21]
[22]
[23]
[24]
[25]
This is a competitor of the searchtexoma spammer, whose domains have also been listed (separately) for blackisting. See:
One or both of these may be tied to the carinsurance.com spammer. See:
It's hard to tell since either or both the DSB/texomaland and searchtexoma spammers may have engaged in some Joe jobbing.
Blacklisting requested. --
A. B.
(talk) 15:58, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
This person has been busy since our December 2006 discussion. Also, I turned up evidence this spammer had been adding additional domains to additional articles using additional accounts for much longer than realized back in December.
Partial list of accounts used to add this spam:
Sites spammed by various accounts:
Partial list of articles spammed:
See also:
This is a competitor of the searchtexoma spammer, whose domains have also been listed (separately) for blackisting. (See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#DSB Worldwide spam on Wikipedia: texomaland.com and User talk:24.116.127.234 for more information on this one). One or both of these may be tied to the carinsurance.com spammer (see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#Outside opinions wanted: CarInsurance.com); it's hard to tell since either or both the DSB/texomaland and searchtexoma spammers may have engaged in some Joe jobbing.
Spam blacklisting requested 16 January 2006 but not yet acted on:
-- A. B. (talk) 16:50, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
In the process of investigating several spammers above who added insurance-related spam:
... I came across a number of other accounts that had added other links to the Vehicle insurance article. I encourage others to work on these as they can. From spot-checking a few user contributions, I think some are just the tips of icebergs involving much more complex spam schemes; some accounts were adding links to a broad range of articles totally unrelated to insurance (those are probably the first that should be investigated.)
Comments and requests:
Thanks! --
A. B.
(talk) 17:41, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
VSIsystems.com and car-insurance-comparison.net (insureme.com) spam in Wikipedia:
Thanks for everyone's help with this one. -- A. B. (talk) 18:20, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
Spam added one link at a time across a wide range of articles over many months
Spam domain:
This is only a partial list:
In most cases, these are one-time use, throw away accounts
This is only a partial list:
Becuase of the hit-and-run, one article-at -a-time nature of this spamming, I am wondering if we should just go ahead and blacklist this domain. It's pretty hard to stop spam by warning accounts that are never to be used again. Your thoughts? -- A. B. (talk) 20:18, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
- :Here are some pointers (you have already been given the links to articles explaining this, so I am putting it in very simple terms):
- :(1) These links are all being put in by editors who are not established editors able to assess appropriateness but by "single purpose users", mainly anonymous IPs who only come and add the links to a handful of articles. Adding just links to articles is unwelcome and adding them in a series is running a link campaign. That is bad.
- :(2) Established editors on these articles have repeatedly taken the links out based on their assessment of them as spam and "single purpose" accounts keep putting them back. That is VERY bad.
- :(3) The use of a number of accounts to put in a few links each looks like use of sockpuppets. Sockpuppets are VERY bad.
- :(4) The links themselves (or at least the dozen I have looked at) are local directories. They do not given additional encyclopedic information on the locations and they are not appropriate under WP:EL. We do not list local directories (even of upcoming events etc) without encyclopedic info on them and the existence of other links is not a precedent (it normally means we just haven't got round to removing them yet). The test is not "is does the site provide information that people interested in that wikipedia page might also find interesting" (e.g. people might find porn interesting on our front page), you have been given links to the policy pages, these links should not be here. The editors who have gone to the trouble of writing a good article on a place think the links are wrong: you should take their word for it.
- :(5) The above 4 points make it look like the links have probably been put in violating WP:COI as well. YOU MUST NOT PUT IN LINKS TO YOUR OWN WEBSITES.
- :(6) Like Matilda's aunt we try to assume good faith until the effort very nearly kills us. However something which looks, smells and sounds like a deliberate link-spam campaign by people linked to the sites listed in the end probably is what it appears to be. You have been asked to stop. Now stop please. --
BozMo
talk 14:24, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
- :(1)When one is new to wikipedia as I and some of my colleagues clearly am, it is easy to make mistakes, and this I feel is being viewed as blatent spamming - I assure you it is not intended. We genuinely feel we have information that is of value to local towns and that was the purpose of creating the links - to provide further information on the towns and the goings on within them. Wikipedia encourages people "don't be afraid...be bold". I wasn't afraid, I was bold - and now I feel I'm having my wrists slapped!!
- :(2)I think it is fair to say the reason people are putting the links back is through lack of understanding of the wikipedia system and why they are not allowed, rather than anything more devious than that. I will try to arrange for additon of links from people directly involved in the franchise to stop. Outside of that, of course, I can have no influence.
- :(3) I've no idea what sockpuppets are, but I think you'll find that this is a case of multiple people putting on the links - all of whom believe it is ok to do so - rather than these sockpuppets. As davidcrane noticed thebestof is a franchise and so each local area has someone different working in it and obviously different people living in them who may also be posting the link believing it to be useful.
- :(4) Porn is not relevant to a local town, so I don't think your comparison is very fair. I have compared many other town pages on wikipedia and other town websites have been featured on wikipedia for considerable lengths of time together with links to newspaper websites - both of which contain many of the elements our sites have, both commercial and non-commercial. I'm sure you can therefore understand why we feel our sites are as appropriate as these and are not spam. For example, when I added the links to the Reigate page, I noticed other local info sites listed there and they have not been removed where my link has.
- :(5) Fair enough - I certainly was unaware of that and will stop doing so myself and will tell others within the franchise not to do so. But I guess other local people who thought our site was interesting could add the link, as they could for any other site they felt was of interest.
- :(6) I can see why this looks worse than it is...but if you can please suspend your disbelief, on this occasion there is no deliberate link-spam campaign, just multiple people all thinking that posting these links was not only acceptable but useful to the population at large.
So, assuming you believe me and now accept that there is no conspiracy or blatent link-spam (which I accept you may not do yet...), on behalf of all of us within thebestof I would like to resolve whether or not our links could ever be acceptable if posted by other people. So can I ask why you feel so strongly that our content does not provide encyclopedic value to the towns? According to the dictionary, encyclopedic means "relating to all branches of knowledge" and I would argue that thebestof provides knowledge on the town concerned - so where does the distinction lie? We have news, just like a newspaper site that appears to be acceptable. We have local information, just like other sites that appear to be acceptable. We have a commercial side - of course - but then local papers are not exactly charity cases! So commercialism is not the answer.
Wikipedia exists to be a fountain of knowledge, does it not? You are the experts, I am the novice - so I will accept your answers but I'd like to understand first. Why is information about a town not "more knowledge"? My site in Bromley for example has easily searched contact information on over 100 schools in the borough - they cannot all post their details on wikipedia separately, so why is a link to our site not useful?
So apart from the fact that to date the approach to putting on the links appears to have been a spam case, and I hope you now accept that is not the case, is there something else you don't like about thebestof that makes you feel the links are inappropriate? Thanks, appreciate your time, kbourne
BozMo - Agreed for my end.
- :(1) We have an internal forum for the franchise and I have just posted a comment to ask everyone to stop making any links at least until we have an agreement.
- :(2) I'd like to continue the discussion to help the established editors decide whether thebestof is considered valuable content or not. Is this the right place to have that conversation?
- :(3) Agreed - see point 2.
- :(4) Also agreed.
Kbourne 17:02, 25 January 2007 (UTC)kbourne
I disagree unless it can be shown that these links meet WP:RS. I say that not out of hostility, but out of quality control. -- A. B. (talk) 18:15, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
These three domains:
have some points in common:
Three IPs so far have been found doing this:
Articles being linked include Richard R. Schrock, Ryoji Noyori, Irwin Rose, Peter Agre, Avram Hershko, etc. They all seem to be related to Nobel prizes, thus I think the user is trying to boost the domains rank by associating them with Nobel. User:Veinor first discovered this, and since then we have been creating this small list. If you find further domains being inserted in Nobel-related topics and can determine the whois information is the same, please add them here. Thanks. -- ReyBrujo 21:43, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
See:
Just change out the user name and you'll probably find most anyone else on Wikipedia.
And check out all the mirrors for Hu12:
Cheers, -- A. B. (talk) 21:40, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
heres a whole bunch of questionables. seems spammy, and i doubt it is a reliable source. thoughts? JoeSmack Talk 22:23, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm posting this here for the record since we'll probably see the spammer come around with a whitelist request.
Spammed both English and Swedish language Wikipedias, then blanked a portion of Meta:Talk:Spam blacklist
Accounts used (partial list):
-- A. B. (talk) 02:15, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
Someone has inserted links to teach12.com product URLs all over 41+ articles. teach12.com is "The Teaching Company" and most of the links are to product pages selling $70 DVDs and whatnot. They might be affiliate links, or they might be spam directly from the company, but whatever it is it's commercial link spam. Sinned 08:45, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
This user has continued to spam after a warning from Hu12 so (with my newly acquired buttons) I have blocked them for 24 hours. I am partly putting the note here as a self-memo to go back and check. Here is the site links he was spamming (we've got all the links for now) [32] -- BozMo talk 12:52, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
In continuation of ideas trying to automate and streamline efforts to eliminate the spam problem, I'm thinking of ways to improve auto blacklisting. What just came to me is perhaps we should have a mark as spam option that trusted users could use to automatically flag a domain as spam. We could vary the level of trust and how urgently or seriously the designation as spam is, either to auto revert links from that domain or just to flag them for futher review. Ideally we'd have some level where further review was only after the fact of getting the site blacklisted and links removed. Blacklisting in this case could either be just at the spambot level or taking it up to the Meta blacklist level depending on need. The option could be added into popups for example, and when an external link is highlighted with the mouse a popup comes up with options to blacklist or flag for blacklisting, etc. Maybe have the rights to do that limited to people on an approved list like AWB uses. If people don't want to go with one click blacklisting (which I do think we need for truly trusted users) perhaps anything flagged twice or more would get blacklisted. Maybe this could be integrated into the admin tools, so just as people can rollback vandalism, spam can be rolled back with one click, whether or not it's the last edit to an article. In any case, we have to work on automated tools if we want to stay ahead of the game. Thanks all. - Taxman Talk 14:36, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
newadvent.org
Adsense pub-8168503353085287
Does not seem to provide a unique resource beyond what the articles its linked on already contains. Looks to have the purpose of selling books. Theres literaly thousands of these links--
Hu12 17:56, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
I wonder how this one has slipped under the radar. lulu.com currently with 381 links of no value. A collaborative effort should get this cleaned up in an evening. ✤ JonHarder talk 23:56, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
Links to *.bikecyclingreviews.com have been slowly added to bike related articles by someone from Spain:
I'd like a second opinion before removing them all. The edits looks like self-promotional, since the registrant of www.bikecyclingreviews.com is also from Spain [33].
— Red Thrush 13:28, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
I just notified ANI: there is some kind of spamming by proxy currently in progress. See *.supermortgagerate.info and *.besttradelink.info. ✤ JonHarder talk 14:35, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Is there a policy to report spamming editors for potential ? Or should I just wait for them to violate 3RR? Right now I'm looking at [34] repeatedly adding links in multiple places to Arlington Heights, Illinois and Arlington High School (Arlington Heights, Illinois), it seems like the editor has made no other edits besides the spamming. -- Milo H Minderbinder 18:32, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
User was unblocked after promising to be nice and is back as User:T54. So far, only contributions are still to promote arlingtoncards.com. I guess at least he's using talk pages thus far: maybe we can talk some sense into him. -- Satori Son 06:55, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
This website has numerous lists of universities for various countries and US states which list the universities in their order of "web popularity". It seems that most of those pages have been linked to on the Wikipedia (see [36]). I also found a discussion where an IP complained about the deletion of one of their links and tries to defend the website here. My personal opinion is that lists that the website has aren't any more useful than the lists in the articles where the links have been added as external links, and therefore should all be deleted and the website added to the MediaWiki's spam blacklist. Blank Verse 13:07, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
The Wikipedia:WikiProject Victoria Cross Reference Migration moved a heap of content into wikipedia, the old domain is now being squatted and we are providing heaps of links to it. Could someone with access to some sort of automated tool, find and replace the links to the external site with a link to the wikiproject instead please? - Peta 05:53, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
The first draft of Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam/Incident Noticeboard is now live. Anyone have any suggestions, comments or critiques before we go live with this? --- J.S ( T/ C/ WRE) 06:56, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
I thought everyone might enjoy this interesting example of low-key linkspam. Achalmeena ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) has engaged in a long term link spam of a website which apparently scrapes content from WP, edits it, slaps it with adsense (pub-3054588969723659) and then links it back to WP. From the index of the industrialsoft.org site: "These articles have been hand-picked from Wikipedia, tidied up (by deletion only, not alteration), checked for plausibility and suitability (by volunteers, whom we gratefully acknowledge) and put together." So it's like old versions of articles except with content deleted! It probably slipped by because the editor also made seemingly useful contributions to highly technical articles. Other links lead to a rather suspicious "download" page for software that seems mariginally related to the articles. There's even a "wiki" about traditional Indian medicine that has been linked.
I'll delete the links. Is this block or ban worthy for the user? Nposs 04:49, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
A group of IP's is lately adding jewellery.php5.cz/diamond/neil-diamond-play-me.html to pages (disruptively), latest IP: 58.103.65.123. I can't get onto #wikipedia-spam-t, so I report it here. -- Dirk Beetstra T C 09:50, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
I archived this page again, if I screwed something up, go chase me :D. On a related note, if we are talking about blacklisting a site, can we not link to it here ( http://example.com) but rather just put example.com. This would save the meta-blacklist from kicking in, and preventing saving of this page. Archiving this was hell :P, about 10 times I had to go back and forth to the meta-blacklist warning, remove a link, and repeat.
Also another related note, as this page is very busy, could we think about bringing User:Werdnabot in? I am more then willing to set the bot up, and we can have it archive talk over say... 5 days old. That might make this page a bit easier to use. Cheers! —— Eagle 101 ( Need help?) 10:40, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
I continue to be surprised to find resources, discussions, etc. on Wikipedia of which I was unaware. I feel sometimes as if I am reinventing wheels as I help out with WP:WPSPAM. Here's today's discovery:
Many of us have seen how a site will paste in Wikipedia content to get their own articles, then cover the page with ads. Sometimes, they then add spam links to our articles to their site. It turns out Wikipedia tries to track these sites; see:
A link from a Wikipedia article to a mirror site with a bunch of ads is almost certainly blatant spam and the list above can be a good resource. Likewise, as we find scraper sites in the course of tracking down spam, we should be updating the list at
Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks.
"Scraping" Wikipedia for any purpose can be legal provided certain very minimal steps are taken, however the typical
link-spammer doesn't always bother; from the
scraper site article:
Wikipedia critic
Daniel Brandt ran an analysis to try to show that there is a lot of plagiarism within Wikipedia -- that is, Wikipedia authors pasting copyrighted material into Wikipedia articles:
As a byproduct of this investigation, Brandt identified 972 sites that use Wikipedia material without proper attribution. He posted the list on Wikipedia Review:
I've left a note at
Wikipedia talk:Mirrors and forks inviting the mirror and fork volunteers to join our discussion here. It seems like there are synergies between what we're doing here and what the mirror and fork volunteers are doing. Other observations, questions and suggestions:
-- A. B. (talk) 16:13, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
Jdevalk left me the following note:
Many thanks to Jdevalk-- A. B. (talk) 18:56, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
While experimenting with the new Wikiseek-and-destroy method, I came across http://www.lindacroppformayor.com/. It is currently linked to the appropriate article ( Linda W. Cropp) and looks just fine. The source code, though, shows multiple spammy links. Should I remove the link or leave it since it doesn't really help the secretly linked pages? Nposs 20:11, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
User:Jrandell is a persistent spammer - links are removed, but can/should anything be done about the user page? CiaranG 07:58, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I went ahead and put it up for MfD. If the user had made any constructive edits...anything more than simply adding spamlinks I might have been more hesitant. The account it obviously just an advertising account. IrishGuy talk 23:29, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
second opinions on this review site? it has its own article too, HipHopDX.com. JoeSmack Talk 14:03, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
here is a lyrics site that needs a sweep, hundred some links. JoeSmack Talk 14:04, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Diabetes and Diabetes mellitus external links and reference sections are way to long... I'd remove them almost all and just link to DMOZ, what do you guys think? -- Jdevalk 21:23, 31 January 2007 (UTC)