Do wikis work?

How do you keep spammers away?

[a1call]

Hi,
I just edited a wiki I found and was surprised that all previous people who had visited had behaved so well.

How come these are not spammed?
Does anyone have any experience with them?
Thanks

[trillianjedi]

How come these are not spammed?

1. Rollbacks are easy.
2. Not everyone on the net is a spammer ;-)

TJ

[mhhfive]

wikis do get spammed. some of them have captchas or whatever those things are called. (the wavvy letters and numbers to make sure you're a human.)

[zCat]

Check the edit history of major cities on Wikipedia.org. Almost daily some jokers insert links to travel / hotelbooking sites, and its only the large number of Wikipedia activists which ensure these links get removed within minutes.

[JerryOdom]

I imagine they do a very large number of rollbacks. Its probably easy to write robots to prevent most obnoxious spam.

[bird]

Most Wikis have constantly growing blacklists of spammer domains, and automatically prevent changes trying to add one of them. Those are the same lists as used in the blogging world, and get exchanged regularly between all affected parties.

Apart from that, people just need to watch what is happening, and take the appropriate measures as soon as spam is detected. It also helps to modify the submit forms (using different field names as in the standard software distribution), to keep the bots away.