Tom Heath wrote:
Sure...
Looking at http://everywhere.openguides.org/ suggests it comes in some slightly different forms. At the OGMK we get new Categories and Locales that go something like:
Locale/Category Rolex Replicas Locale/Category How to Make Money
but they have no content. From http://everywhere.openguides.org/ scroll down to Open Guide to Milton Keynes, then entries "by Auto Create at July 05, 2006 11:38 AM". I've since removed these pages from our guide, but they _will_ reappear <sigh>
Ah - that's an easy one to kill :)
At OGLancaster (and OGLondon) it looks like you're getting similar stuff, but with URLs embedded in the category and locale names, which weirdly we don't get in the OGMK (a slightly different config perhaps??).
Seems there's less of a pattern to this spam than I thought - seems I'll have to find a new way of recognising it..
Either way, http://everywhere.openguides.org/ is a great way of spotting these, as it reads the RSS feed of recent changes, which has *different* data to the HTML page of Recent Changes. I think there's something to be said for this (though not clear about how it's working in the underlying code), as it keeps the spam off the Home and Recent Changes pages, whilst still allowing Admins to read the RSS feeds to see what's really going on. I have no idea if this was an explicit design decision, or simply the way it happened.
Yeah, I'm not sure how it works myself :) Found lots when I looked thoguh - thanks for reminding me!
Hope this helps :) and good luck. Is your tool something that could be deployed centrally to clean spam from all OGs? If yes, what do people think of that suggestion?
The problem with that is the app requires a password, and since every guide has a different password, it isn't feasible. (Though the scripts could be ran centrally, if required, with different config files). If there's a need for it, I could implement a feature where you could enter the url/password in the commandline?
Clair