How to fight Wiki Spam

[former_member374]

The more success the more spam right? Our SAP TechEd Wiki is getting more popular and the spammers come more frequent too.

The first sign that a page has been spammed is, when it takes super long to load. How does that help the spammer when the page times out?

Here are the easy steps on how you can bring the page back to it's previous state. If you are on a spammed page, just hit the previous version triangle on the top page navigation. It will jump to the last good version. Hit edit and save right after and the last good version is now also the latest aka live version. That's all.

Now what if the spammed page doesn't even load? Take the back door to check whether the page really is spammed.

Here is what I just did regarding the Boston page that wasn't loading:

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/teched05/index.cgi?SAP_TechEd_Boston

I tried  the edit page:

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/teched05/index.cgi?action=edit&page_id=SAP_TechEd_Boston

(If it is a different page, just exchange the part after the _id= with the wiki name.)

Yes it was full of spam. I deleted the page and wrote just "homepage" on it. (Actually I learned from  Craig how he  doing it today with the main Wiki page.) With that we got rid of the spam. Excellent.

Now let's get the last good content back to the page.  Select the black triangle in the top navigation line to get back to a previous version:

But if it was not loading before, it will not now. So the easier way is to copy the shortcut:

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/teched05/index.cgi?action=revisions&page_id=SAP_TechEd_Boston&revision_id=48

Substract one from the revision_id here it is 47

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/teched05/index.cgi?action=revisions&page_id=SAP_TechEd_Boston&revision_id=47

Hit edit and save that page. With that the old version is back and everyone can go on working.

Can't wait for Wiki Wiki World and Portals to write the security integration post here on SDN and may be next year we find the time to integrate the Wiki with SDN, so that you need an SDN user to change it.

There will be discussions about it in the SDN Clubhouse at the SDN Contributor Meet BOF Session. Please make time in your busy SAP TechEd schedule and be there and join the discussion.