Spam on the Who is using page

[Manuel]

Hi folks!

In my opinion, the Who is using page is generally a good thing. In recent times, however, spammers/spambots seem to have discovered it. As for now, it's full of dubious links, which in fact may have been posted thanks to the new link entry form at the top of the page (IIRC, it used to be a wiki page which could only be edited by retaining the wiki syntax).

So, I wonder if anybody's going to rid the page of all that rubbish and/or whether it wouldn't be better to introduce some kind of mandatory check & approval of new submissions by humans to prevent spam from getting listed?

Best regards,
-Manuel

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Sadly the implementation of that page in coWiki is a bit problematic, as its custom-made. Jannis is AFAIK working on providing an admin interface to remove entries there, so I hope we will soon have a way to get rid of the spam with the help of people here.

A check&approval system would only make sense if we have reliable people checking that list. It would make no sense if new entries take a week to get published...

Best regards,
Garvin

[carl_galloway]

Hi everyone,

Just letting you all know that Jannis is actually taking the issue of spam very seriously and has given me access to the who's who page to delete spam. I generally don't like spam very much so I will be quite aggressive until this is under control. Today I have marked as spam over a couple of hundred links. Some of the links have not been marked as spam because even though the sites are advertising spam related products they are also using Serendipity. I'm sure things will improve over the next few days, but can I ask for a round of virtual applause for Jannis for getting onto this.

Carl

[judebert]

*golf clap*

[chickens]

I see that serendipity adds a meta tag stating that the site is powered by it, why not use this to your advantage here? Make the script grab a copy of the site and look for this tag. If the site does not have the tag than odds are its a spam site. If it does have the tag they are going to quite a bit of work to spam and that can be cleaned out by hand easy enough.

Personally, I was surprised to see my site was added immediately after submitting it. Most sites that I go to take a long while to get anything listed. That just seems to be the norm anymore. I don't think that most people expect immediate approval in these days of spam bots.

[jhermanns]

what we need is a captcha plus a quick check on whether or not the page is running serendipity. even with a "display after approval" system we need these measures, as nobody wants to disapprove 300 spam links a day.

i'll work on it when i have the time, until then no submissions will be accepted.

[carl_galloway]

Good thoughts, not sure how practical it would be to implement since many of our users embed their install into other pages, or they customise their template and remove some of the meta tags.

I've taken an aggressive attitude with sites that shouldn't be there, and with a little luck everyone should notice the cleanup immediately. A couple of legitimate serendipity sites may have been marked as spam but only if their server responded that the site no longer exists or the browser was redirected to somewhere supicious. I came across about 5 or 6 sites that tried to install trojans, and these have been marked as well and I've also taken great delight in flushing out WP, Joomla and other engines, quite simply because the who's who page is for serendipity.

Just a thought, how does everyone feel about taking the approach that if your url ain't showing serendipity within one click, then it ain't gonna stay on the who's who page. And what do people think about users who post their url multiple times in the same country listing. Personally I think this counts as spam, I understand being listed in several country areas if their site really does belong in them.

[yellowled]

And what do people think about users who post their url multiple times in the same country listing. Personally I think this counts as spam, I understand being listed in several country areas if their site really does belong in them.

It's been some time since I put my blog into that list, so I don't remember the exact procedure, but is it possible that at least some of that multiple entries might simply be 'interface mistakes'? You know, like: 'Hm, doesn't show up. Well, I'll just do it again.' (must be a Windows user in that case )

So I think if the site actually is a s9y site, leave it in the list once, but delete the 'copies'.

YL