User talk:Blo

Spam security

I noticed that you're listed as one of the sysops/bureaucrats for this Wiki. I visited for the first time today, hoping to learn about Winamp skin creation, but instead found a wall of link spam, advertising illicit drug sales. It appears that whoever is doing it found that Google and other search engines are scanning the Wiki's User space, so they've created accounts that include names of the wares, i.e., drugs they're peddling, and put links to their sales operation on the User pages. You should consider changing the Wiki setup so Web crawler robots are excluded from the User space entirely — the User pages and the User Talk pages.

You should also consider locking the Wiki down so that unregistered users can't edit at all. Most of the spam pages were set up as User pages, but from the Recent Changes log, it is clear that they've been maintained and updated by one or more anonymous IP users. This shouldn't be much of an inconvenience for serious users, as this Wiki doesn't deal with sensitive subjects where users may need to hide their identities.

I spend quite a bit of time editing at Wikipedia, but I've never seen as much linkspam and trash there, probably because the user community is so large and active: Most vandalism and spam is discovered within minutes of being posted and reverted or blanked. The Winamp Developer Wiki, on the other hand, isn't visited frequently, and the miscreants have had periods of days, even weeks, where they've been able to do their misdeeds undetected and unhindered. Hydragyrum 06:27, 18 February 2009 (UTC)