Wiki cleanup, aisle 7

[TeoTwawki]

I deleted over one thousand spam pages out of the wiki tonight. The wiki has been so hammered by spammers that this is the reason you have to contact Whasf in order to get a wiki account. To put in in perspective, when I started deleting them earlier today the wiki was at 4,199 pages. So I just dropped nukes on approximately 1/4 of the wiki, and I'm not even done yet.

If you have a wiki account I've made a template users can tag pages they come across that should be deleted, which automatically adds the pages to a category containing all pages up for deletion.

Code: Select all

{{DEL|reason=spam}}

You don't actually have to change the page other than to add that line. If you have a reason other than spam you can replace that with your actual reason. Just placing that into a page does the deed. If you don't have an account but would like one, talk to Whasf.

Measure to prevent spammers from signing up are still under consideration, I and whasf spoke about it a few times.

[buddysievers]

why are people doing something like that?
i mean i dont think its se who spamms your wiki so how bored your life must be to do such things...
its just sad.

[nasomi]

The desire to make money. Spamming wiki's, forums, etc is effortless and free, and results in clicks to links, which generates money on their end. With scripts making the pages, they go up faster than staff can take them down, so it's real easy to keep the links up generating revenue from unsuspecting people. If they weren't making money from it, they wouldn't be doing it. They aren't doing it with malicious intent, they just want to make a few bucks. Unfortunately, it's a giant headache for anyone who has to clean it up, though.

[Delaide]

Well, I have been flagging slowly. Once the new flags are cleared, we will have a* and b* pages cleaned up, but that leaves the rest of the library. Approximately 6000 more pages...

One question, since the wiki actually has very few pages, as compared to the spam, is: Do we have a better way to do this?
I have created a new category:
https://wiki.dspt.info/index.php/Category:DSP

I can just put all pages we wish to keep in this category, and once complete we can nuke all other pages. I believe Whasf has some thoughts also which he will check on you with. Otherwise, while it will take a while to get through them all, I can just keep flagging the spam pages as I progress.