2006-05-11

Hey Alex, I think I’m banging into another instance of the 2006-04-11 problem I had.

I tried to add an internal wiki-link to http://communitywiki.org/odd/SoftwareBazaar/SoftwarePeopleWant and I got this message:

“Edit Denied … Rule “\bblogspot\.com\b” matched … on this page. See BannedContent for more information.”

It complained about 2 links I added months ago, long before that bad-content rule was created.

• if blogspot really is an evil spammer, please tell me.
• if blogspot is innocent, please change the rule so it doesn’t block those good links.
• Is there any way to search the Odd Wiki for this kind of possibly-spam links? Links that somehow slipped in, before rules against them were created?

– DavidCary

I don’t think it is currently possible to search for all pages matching a BannedContent pattern. If you were an administrator, you could run a global search-and-replace, but as an administrator, BannedContent does not apply. So that, too, is not an option. I would have to code something up.

Blogspot is just a general free service that allows anybody including spammers to create pages and links. And spammers are using these to boost pagerank indirectly, I assume:

They spam us with links for their innocuous links to a service such as Blogspot or Geocities, and there they link to their real target page. And since pagerank is transitive, their target pagerank is also boosted.

I would suggest you create a Tiny URL for the link in question, for example.

– AlexSchroeder

In the short term, yes, I will use TinyURL to link directly to these pages (which, as far as I can tell, are innocent, even though spammers infest other areas of BlogSpot and Geocities).

In the longer term, won’t you ban TinyURL as well? Since they also are

• a “general free service that allows anybody including spammers to create pages and links.”, and
• spammers can “spam us with links for their innocuous links to … (TinyURL?) …, and there they link to their real target page. And since pagerank is transitive, their target pagerank is also boosted.”

Or is there something different about TinyURL that somehow stops spammers … or at least doesn’t boost the pagerank of spammers?

– DavidCary

You are absolutely right in that TinyURL might someday be a candidate for banning. It’s a moving target. I recently saw that David Andel has reverted the generic blogspot ban on the BannedContent master list. So perhaps in this particular case, the tinurl hack is no longer necessary.

– AlexSchroeder