Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam/2006 Archive Nov

message: seem junky. If anyone want to have a go at them, there are only about 20 on article pages. JonHarder 05:37, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Another easy cleanup for someone is . JonHarder 14:50, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks to whoever cleaned up ticketdepo. JonHarder 02:35, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  textamerica 

message: (copied from above as it may have been overlooked)
The debate at Wikipedia:Nofollow in February 2005 is now 20 months old.  Many of the keep votes then argued that nofollow was too bleeding edge or that the issue of spam was manageable by vandalism patrols.  Neither of those arguments can no longer be used. — Moondyne 09:59, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with Moondyne on this. I have no knowledge of any previous discussions on the topic, but it seems sensible to me to just adopt the same policy for English language articles as for user pages and non-english articles. There's no implied commitment of a bi-directional linking arrangement with anyone, is there? I think making Wikipedia less of a juicy target for link spammers would cut down on a lot of the unproductive maintenence work. --Loqi T. 07:20, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I very much agree and this is brought up every now and then on this talk page. I don't want to sound like I'm pushing for a cabal of spam-fighters but I think that if we hope to reopen the debate formally, it would be good to work beforehand on a well thought out set of points in favor of rel=nofollow with a few statistics and facts from our experience to back it up. Pascal.Tesson 07:28, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

text: I'm new to this. Any leads on what to read up on? --Loqi T. 07:38, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well I think that if you read Wikipedia:Nofollow you'll get a pretty good idea of the issues. But be warned: it's not the most exciting thing you've read on Wikipedia... Pascal.Tesson 07:48, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I like the "nofollow" idea, very much. --Elonka 21:36, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Being linked from Wikipedia has become a popularity contest, and at worst it's become a coveted revenue-stream. In theory, a good External links section only has a few select links even when there are many equally-good links. Since we are not concerned with linking to everything of relevance on a subject fairly, we end up promoting a few links over others and thus the reward for having "your" link chosen is disproportionately high. Our goal isn't to tell our readers what links are good or not but to collect useful information here. The way we use links is fundamentally at odds with the way Google and others want us to use them, and so I think using rel=nofollow on all links in articlespace is very much warranted. — Saxifrage ✎ 18:40, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I completely agree, Saxifrage.  Even with using rel=nofollow, an idea I support strongly, we'll still be subjected to intense and repeated lobbying (often economically driven, as you point out) to include ever more links. Article editors need to establish and enforce firm and very conservative standards about what will be included in a given set of articles (i.e., there's not one standard that will necessarily fit all kinds of articles).  We especially need to watch the syndrome of people actually creating WP articles about their target web site, as a dodge around the WP:EL guidelines that would tend to apply to their desired link being inserted in a core article.  Cases like these have seen us (for an actual example) get into endless and pointless debate about whether a given site is really notable because it was once mentioned in a newspaper columnist's contribution in central Minnesota.  In my mind, the fewer external links in an article (other than as source references), the better.  This is wholly consistent with WP:EL's declaration that External links should be used sparingly and kept to a minimum.' -- PKtm 19:32, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

text: I've been plodding through Wikipedia:Nofollow. You were right Pascal, I've had more fun at the dentist's. I intend to learn all the arguments, but for now, the biggest thing that strikes me is that the remove position means "stop using nofollow"; meaning before the vote to remove, nofollow was the standard. So was there a time when nofollow was the standard for English article space, which has since been overturned? If so, we might be able to see if changes in spamming patters were influenced by changes in Wikipedia policy? Am I missing something here? --Loqi T. 05:07, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: As I understand the history, Google came up with the nofollow idea initially in about January 2005, announcing it here (as well as at other places I presume) and the Wikimedia developers adopted it without consultation believing (reasonably) that it was a sensible idea for adoption across the entire wikimedia universe.  The debate at Wikipedia:Nofollow subsequently ensued and it use was ceased here as of March 6, 2005.  As for changes in spamming patterns before and after those events, I cannot imagine how any quantitive data could support either side of the argument as the SEO industry has ballooned in the same period.  Opponents might argue that that SEO growth proves that nofollow is inneffective and therefore, why bother having it. — Moondyne 07:03, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

text: nofollow is not a significant spam help.  In general there two reasons links are spammed here, seo reasons and direct website traffic.  Since it takes 30 seconds or less to add a link it is pollyanna-ish to think removing one of the two reasons will have any effect.  Traffic from a link is still worth taking 30 seconds to add the thing.  The thing to think about in combating spam links is that 30 seconds.  If a spammer had to take the time to be a registered user to add an external link, maybe 90% of spam links would be eliminated (not to mention the spammers would be easier to track).  I don't have much opinion about nofollow other than it is basically pointless in this context.  It won't make much difference (if only because half the spammers would be too dumb to know the nofollow was there).  Nofollow would lessen spam here by a tiny amount (notice this is the experience on the rest of the web).  Making it harder to spam by requiring a login would reduce spam at least ten times more. 2005 11:11, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Hey, thanks you two. Right now, when any kind of submission contains a blacklisted link, the wiki software currently (buggily) turns the edit back and asks the user to remove the offending link. Is there an existing technical way to do this for anonymous submissions containing any external link? I'd certainly support using something like that. --Loqi T. 15:02, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No there's not and what you said might be considered at odds with one of the basic principles of editing - anyone can edit without registering as a user.  Also we assume good faith in all edits. To allow addition or removal of text but disallow addition of external links does not make much sense to me.  A better proposal is to ban anon edits altogether - that has been considered and rejected before I believe (but I cannot remember where). — Moondyne 15:48, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't see it being at odds actually. External links are the least-desired addition to an article: all our spam templates exhort the adder to please add content, not more links. Removing the ability of anonymous users to add links would stop anonymous editors of all kinds (who very rarely understand or even know about WP:EL even if they're not spammers) from adding inappropriate links. The only editors who this would impact are those few who don't have accounts but are effectively regular non-anonymous editors because they have a fixed IP address. If outbound links could only be added to non-Article and non-Template space pages, then collaboration on Talk pages would be unimpeded, which is where new links really should appear first anyway. — Saxifrage ✎ 23:33, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: On further consideration, I realise there's a flaw in my argument above. Though I think it would be wonderful to keep IPs from adding links, how can I expect IPs to add content if they aren't allowed to add a link that references the content? I realise most IPs that add content don't bother referencing, but there's definitely a conflict there. — Saxifrage ✎ 16:44, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

text:  I first started using Wikipedia as an anonymous reader. Eventually, I was correcting a word here, a comma there. Over time, it became paragraphs and whole pages. It was only when I wanted to participate in something controversial that I felt I needed an account. I probably never would have made an account just to scratch my grammar itch. I tend to be suspicious of sites that require login for "enhanced content". I can say from my own perspective being allowed to edit anything I see except outbound links would not have set off my AGF radar, then or now. AGF has its limits. I wouldn't be offended if the guy who picks me up hitchhiking wants to see my license before letting me do the driving. --Loqi T. 15:45, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: rel="nofollow"

message: Is there some work going on with the wiki software development in the area of user reputation management tools? This is related to spam, vandalism, personal attacks, and any other sort of antisocial behavior on Wikipedia. All we have is our own personal memories of our separate interactions with each-other. We need a way of earning and squandering our standing based on what our peers think of what we're doing around here. Then we can spot the trouble makers, as well as get tangible feedback on the good stuff we've been doing that maybe wasn't so good after all. This seems like an obvious idea that someone must have thought of before. Can anyone point me in the right direction on this one? --Loqi T. 09:40, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've not heard of such a thing other than a user initited peer review at WP:ER.  We always try to assume good faith of other editors and any grading based on past behaviour would probably be at conflict with this. — Moondyne 12:21, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Perhaps you're right, Moondyne. Sometimes the old ways are best. Still, I do have some great ideas on the topic, and would like to take them to the right people. If anyone has any leads, I'd be most grateful. --Loqi T. 16:50, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

text: In the discussion about small item vetting in the section below, A.B. mentions some foreign language articles and points out that the German Wikipedia has a different cultural approach toward user disruptions. PKtm describes the german wiki concept of "Vertrauensnetz" ("web of trust"), in which users publish standardized personal assessments of the trustworthiness (as opposed to agreeability) of other users they've encountered. This is one of many possible tools to make researching users more efficient (and probably more accurate). Such a feature may or may not offend political sensibilities, but I think it could have tremendous practical benefits. Has a similar idea come up in the past on the English language side? --Loqi T. 18:59, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Automated user reputation management 

message: I'm no fan of adding extra layers of bureaucracy, but this idea seems to have the potential of massively reducing spam patrol workload, while increasing fairness [accuracy]. The increased fairness [accuracy] benefit comes through deeper scrutiny of fewer cases, by knowledgeable, interested parties. Consider this idea:
One problem with how we've been treating the blacklist is that it takes work to get a site listed, and it takes work to get a site de-listed.
What if we had a graylist of suspected spam domains, where anyone can conveniently add a link at any time. Then, to get the link moved to the blacklist or whitelist would require discussion.
The graylist could mean something like "links to domains that someone is suspicious of". So then, any instance of such a link on the wiki could be flagged with a little symbol of suspicion. And then any interested party would have a heads-up to give the link further scrutiny.
The whitelist could mean "domains that have been on the graylist, and have since [that have formally] cleared a discussion". These domains would be treated the same as unknown domains, and allowed on the wiki, except that putting whitelisted domains on the gray- or blacklist would require discussion.
The blacklist could mean "domains that have been condemned in discussion". These domains can be revived after new discussion. But this list should not carry any sanction other than that the links can't be added back to wiki pages without discussion. (The blacklist should not be confused with the proposed list under discussion above.)
Hopefully in this way, an article with an excessively long EL section would begin to attract "suspicious link" symbols, giving that article's editors additional incentive to clean up their act. Casual encyclopedia readers would get a bold clue, differentiating the good links from the potential spam links, and spam patrols don't need to be quite so ponderous. Instead of figuring out what every link means, we could be deleting the obvious spam, and just flag the stuff we're not so sure about.
Any thoughts?
Loqi T. 15:35, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Such a list would be extremely vulnerable to spammers adding their competitors to the list. The amount of discussion and bureaucracy would spiral out of control. — Saxifrage ✎ 18:29, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The frictionless graylist 

message: has been repeatedly making significant edits to the PF Flyers article, some of which seems to be advertising content (probably cut and pasted from some official site), some of which seems to be a hoax (the D.R. Samuels bit).  Editor has not responded to comments left on his talk page and has not explained any of the edits on the article talk page or in edit summaries.  Anyhow, I'm up against the 3RR limit, so I'm sending it here instead. --Alan Au 23:32, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: copyvio from pfflyers.com. User warned, article reverted. 3RR certainly doesn't apply to copyvio. JonHarder 23:55, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  PF Flyers 

message: I have not seen that much (yet) in the established articles I've checked. I've heard one preferred technique for more sophisticated spamdexers is to create multiple, new, somewhat obscure articles that appear to pass the cut as legitimate articles and then embed a legitimate-looking link in each one -- sometimes to a seemingly legit site, which in turn has one or two embedded links to their real quarry. That intermediate site would get high ranking due to multiple inbound links from Wikipedia; that high ranking would in turn rub off on the ultimate destination.
I suspect we're catching many of the beginning- and intermediate-level spamdexers but not the truly slick ones.
If Wikipedia has 1.4 million articles, I'll bet there are hundreds of thousands of little, never-edited stubs floating around that no one's really ever scrutinized. Most would be benign if unencyclopedic, but I'll bet we'd see some of this spamdexing phenomenum. Special:Newpages shows 2200 new pages created just in the last 24 hours.
It would be great if some Wikipedian wrote a bot to troll those pages collecting external links to a list that would rank-order linked-to domains with a list of the articles involved with each one. Since there would be many frequently linked, benign sites, the bot could have a white-list filter just as anti-vandalism bots have blacklist filters of red-flag words. --A. B. 19:25, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: As far as I know, links are already indexed within the database, so pulling a list such as this out of the database would be only slightly more work than Special:Linksearch currently does. So, this would be better as a feature request for MediaWiki than in a bot. It would be less resource-intensive too. — Saxifrage ✎ 20:51, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This is already done, though in a different form. Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#IRC LinkFeed (agian) for a basic description of what has been done —— Eagle (ask me for help) 23:55, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Clearly I need to figure out how to do IRC. Thanks for doing this. --A. B. 00:43, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Wikipedian bot-writer wanted

message: wikiHow.com] is a useful wiki on the Internet not directly connected to Wikipedia. It's not always policed closely for spam and some editors have taken to spamming wikiHow, then linking articles here to the spammed wikiHow articles, some of which are content-light.
Here's the current list of links to wikiHow -- many are benign links to useful articles, so please edit with a light hand as you look at these links. --A. B. 18:19, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: So far, most links are not super-abusive (although WikiHow does have Google ads). I did find one fascinating use of Wikihow, Wikipedia and various blogs to promote a business, however. See Inventoritis -- they've done a very, very clever job. --A. B. 06:58, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Using [[WikiHow|wikiHow]] to "spam through" to Wikipedia 

message: Continuation of earlier discussion, initiated by A. B. 20:51, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: One way to reduce the value of spamming scruffy little stubs on Wikipedia would be for Google to stop giving the stub pages much authority unless Wikipedia seems to be heavily interlinking them. I am only speculating here, but if I were in Google's position, I'd certainly be writing custom algorithms for each of the most important sites on the Internet, as well as constantly refining the broad, general algorithm for the rest. They're probably already treating Wikipedia different from the rest of the Internet, and not just by giving it a high PageRank score to spread around. If they're not, they certainly should be. Any search service would be wise to treat all the stray stubs and secret gardens of Wikipedia the way it treats them on the rest of the Internet. Not every page hosted on Wikipedia is created equal. Maybe an intra-site PageRank-style score would be in order for Google, to pick the corn out of Wikipedia for their search users, and possibly to help us out as well. Do we have an ambassador to Google? --Loqi T. 00:45, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Working relationship with Google 

message: It's good to see active spam-aware admins like  who closed Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anaplerosis. Other admins seemed reluctant to close the AfD, which remained open longer than most. Centrx went against the prevailing discussion and deleted every article as spam. Thanks! JonHarder 16:05, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Spam-aware admins

message: There has been ongoing spamming on behalf of . From anon  and from throw-away accounts , ,  and . It is mostly links embedded within the article text, with a few in External links. It has been going on for over a week with only a very few being reverted before today. No spam warnings had previously been given. I had actually come across it earlier but didn't recognize the pattern until today. The attempt to add colocationprovider spam probably is not over and bears watching. In fact, as I write this, more has appeared. I'll let someone else have a go at it. JonHarder 23:40, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That page is of such limited use (and questionable "officialness" as a community effort) that I can't imagine Wikipedia ever needing one link to it, even in Colocation centre. There isn't a scrap of referencable material and being a directory listing is of dubious value. I say blacklist it. — Saxifrage ✎ 00:16, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  colocationprovider spam 

message: links have been added by single purpose accounts  and . I think they should be removed. Other thoughts? JonHarder 21:02, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Microbicide? Rely (brand)? Yeah, that's spam. (I took the liberty of cleaning up the multiple links to the site at the subject page too, being redundant. Few subjects need multiple official links, let alone to the same site.) — Saxifrage ✎ 21:30, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've gone through the rest and cleaned all but those used as actual references. JonHarder 03:03, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  ourbodiesourselves.org 

message: I first encountered the endlex.com links when answering machine came on my watchlist with a horribly generic buyer's guide. I found that some person (or group of people) all with different IP addresses seem to have added these links to external links sections. [http:// consumers.endlex.com/Entertainment/walkietalkie.html The entry for walkie-talkie] is a good example, but there were similar buyer's guides for such diverse products as flutes, sleeping bags and mp3 players. I have also removed all links to endlex.com's myriad of (usually badly written) articles about biology and life skills, as well as links to lists of amazon books. Some of this content may be useful but each page contains ads and it's clear that the primary purpose of endlex.com is commercial. Keep an eye on special:linksearch/*.endlex.com. I have removed nearly a hundred links to that site, many from commonly looked up articles and many from the top of the external links list; check my contributions for the list. Graham87 17:17, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That must have been some work! The only difference between "How to Purchase a Car" and "How to Purchase a Toaster" is a paragraph on paying in installments, the same one as in "How to Purchase a Home". What a load of... Looks like typical link farming. Femto 12:56, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Endlex.com 

message: Single purpose account  has added links to . Helpful or not? JonHarder 00:40, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That link seems OK to me - no ads and probably useful.  As long as not too many links are added, I'd have no problem with it. — Moondyne 01:33, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: A collection of manuals has no relevance to the topic of RTFM. IF we link to a manual, use direct links. The site only links back to the official company pages, these middleman links are not appropriate. Femto 12:29, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  manualshark.org 

message: Adsense pub-4269481315839809 
It looks like  is spam. There are 254 such links. I spot-checked a few to see who added them and every one was an anon IP, most in the 221.135.209.* range, which resolves to India. Because of a local DNS problem, I can't actually view the external site. I'm hoping someone can double check and give the green light to start cleaning this up. It would help if others would pitch in and spread the load around. JonHarder 01:41, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree, that's spam, big-time.  Kill it. — Moondyne 14:24, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Some of the links may contain good content but the way they have been transferred to wikipedia is absolutely unacceptable. Also there is no peer review. Therefore I am working on it now but I am mentioning the site name in the edit summary in case there is a problem. I have also been focussing on articles with multiple links to histopothology-india.net - one article had ten links! Graham87 02:38, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: All links removed. I just hope I don't catch any of those scary diseases! :) Instances of adding that link have been reverted before; see User talk:221.135.210.185 and User talk:221.134.46.159, but it should be all clean now. Graham87 07:10, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  histopathology-india.net 

message: On a similar vain, I've removed all links to www.humpath.com and proposed the article humpath.com for deletion. See special:contributions/Patho. Graham87 03:06, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmmm. Don't know about that one. The site appears to be a free, well referenced database. Pascal.Tesson 15:12, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Let's assume good faith and not call it spam. But there should be some sort of consensus established (for example at Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine) before any larger number of links gets added, especially by a single user, to what potentially may be thousands of articles. Femto 16:07, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Humpath.com 

message: Seems Jameslove has been busy throughout this year adding links to websites that are are either definitely his own or are run by a "Mile Media" group (probably his own too). Check out his contribs - I've cleaned up most of the recent ones, but he's added milebymile.com to, oh, a few articles. Needs some cleanup but unfortunately I'm about a week backlogged on my watchlist and don't have the time to do this. Thanks --AbsolutDan (talk) 05:20, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've removed those links that were either contributed by Jameslove, Sharla, SharlaZ or 24.70.100.159, all of which seemed to only add links to milebymile.com. The site seems to be of reasonable quality and has been cited as a reference a few times; I have not removed it in that case. Graham87 03:46, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok fair enough - I'm not convinced it qualifies as a WP:RS, but considering our atrocious lack of cites in our articles I suppose some latitude ought to be given in cases such as you describe. Thank you kindly for your work --AbsolutDan (talk) 22:17, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  James Love & Mile Media 

message: I regularly clean up the external link sections of articles about cities in Oregon. And every so often, I get someone who says: "But you have a link to the chamber of commerce, so why not have my link too?" I actually think the chamber of commerce links should go too (even though they are usually quasi-governmental and not-for-profit), but it seems to be a generally accepted practice to have links to local CoCs in regional articles. My argument to the well-intentioned (i.e. not-for-profit) linkspammer who questions me is that the CoC has information of a more general nature about a location, while the link the spammer is trying to add is promoting a non-city-related cause (not to mention all the usual stuff about promoting one's own organization, etc.) Anyway, my question is: Are links to local chambers of commerce legit, and if so, why? Thanks! Katr67 23:49, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: We had this debate a few months back. The conclusion, as I remember was go on a case by case basis. It does not make sense to have a unified rule. Pascal.Tesson 00:02, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Great, thanks for the link! Katr67 00:17, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chambers of commerce strawpersons 

message: I'm not quite sure what's going on here.  We've suddenly gained links to google maps via this website, see linksearch.  They've arrived in little batches, see the contribs of walbert4, Oasisfresh, SoulSuit, Blowfish34, etc.  I looked at a couple of links, and they are just googgle maps.  Any ideas?  Mr Stephen 23:36, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah, 'tis also at WP:RFI.  Mr Stephen 23:43, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Remove the links, and make sure these users received a friendly note not to mass-add links to external map services. I believe those things are handled through the mapsource page of Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates, one could ask there for their conventions and procedures. Femto 11:03, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi there, I noticed this yesterday too and made the RFI. My guess is that it's someone trying to enhance their Google pagerank or clickthrough rate by trying to dress their spamlink up an innocent "helpful" map. The use of multiple single-purpose registered accounts is clearly an attempt to cover up the activity, but it's still pretty blatant. DWaterson 23:08, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  blackcomb.co.uk 

message: Anybody know what's happening with the redirect to Spamexing? If nothing else, this has effectively deleted the talk page and history for the orignal article. I note that the editor that did this is a high volume editor, so I don't know that this is bad faith, but it is odd. --A. B. 16:33, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Reverted it. Femto 19:37, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

text: I suggest an admin go over this page :D there is a link in it which qualifies as linkspam, and i've been laughing quite hard when i saw it :), especially since the owner added it himself :) --Jdevalk 21:29, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Looking around for more of those, i'd suggest an admin go over all pages concerning SEO, and evaluate the outgoing links... Most of them have at least 1 or 2 spammy links on them. --Jdevalk 21:38, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

text: I've talked to AbsolutDan a bit, and went ahead and deleted a **** load of spammy links. --Jdevalk 23:06, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Spamdexing]] article 

message: See Revenue Girl on "Wikipedia Links: How to Get Them and How to Keep Them", especially the comments by Dave (exploiting cross-Wiki links) and Bill Perry (temporarily turning off Google Adsense). --A. B. 22:40, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Re: using the article How to Win Friends and Influence People, see the edit histories for the article and for . If you click on the name of the blog contributor for the Bill Perry comment, you'll find it links to the same site he was spamming  the article. The guy was warned last month but has continued spamming. --A. B. 23:04, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I see he got a 48-hour block. --A. B. 01:08, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Yeah, I saw that too, linked from a a post on a forum that has several topics on how to get links to stick on wikipedia (check Wikipedia_talk:Spam for links to a couple of interesting threads). It's interesting to read the logic of people who are trying to get a higher page rank from WP. As open as some of them discuss this stuff, I wonder if they see anything wrong with what they're doing. ScottW 04:09, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: ScottW, they see no wrong, they're just earning money :) --Jdevalk 21:32, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Interesting Ideas

message: In order of Wikipedia size (number of articles):
*German:
**http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Linksearch
*French:
**http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Linksearch
*Polish:
**http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Linksearch
*Japanese:
**http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Linksearch
*Dutch:
**http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Linksearch
*Italian:
**http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Linksearch
*Portugese:
**http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Linksearch
*Swedish
**http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Linksearch
*Spanish:
**http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Linksearch
Just change the initial "de." to the language version of your choice and you will get the familiar web link search page, just in a different language. --A. B. 01:34, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Searching for links on other Wikipedias

message: Front page is a pretty, ad-free site for WV photos. Inside pages have lots of Adsense ads. 22 links. --69.241.131.62 00:19, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks like it's been spammed by multiple (likely dynamic) IPs, including 64.119.242.6, 64.119.242.5, and 63.116.12.120. I'll remove all the links for now. If they return we can request addition to the blacklist. --AbsolutDan (talk) 16:25, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd suggest you'd check if these IP's have been used for other (spam) purposes as well, might be proxies... --Jdevalk 21:10, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you - the ones I did check only added this link. If I run into others that re-add it I'll be sure to check for other related spamming from them. --AbsolutDan (talk) 21:16, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: wvpics dot com

message: We have the Spamstar of Glory barnstar for diligent spam-fighters.
Maybe we need something for spammers that are especially dumb, say the Wile E. Coyote award. 
Of course, someone might say it wasn't very civil.... --A. B. 01:47, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You must be doing something right if you've caught their attention. --AbsolutDan (talk) 02:40, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I suppose that's a tad uncivil. But of course, one might expect that from humorless people like you. :-)  Pascal.Tesson 03:09, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Sorry, it's already at the zenith of its artistic glory! --A. B. 02:20, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Awards