I’m cleaning out (from my inbox, WP happily intercepting them based on content) between 5 and 40 spam attacks a day and the other week has my first experience of wikispam, nothing like what Brian & Alan are dealing with but annoying nonetheless.
But how to deal with it, well, picked up this link to some good anti-spam stuff from Raymond Yee and this Jimmy Wales quote (from this interview) sounds like the solution to me:
“Sure, I think it’s pretty simple to solve problems like that. One of the first tricks I would try is to parse the wiki text that someone inputs to see if it contains an external link. If so, then only in those cases, require an answer to a captcha.
Second step, keep editing wide open for everyone, but restrict the ability to post external links to people who are trusted by that community. Make it really easy for trusted users to extend the zone of trust, because you want to encourage participation.”
[from here]
I think that stuff like the wiki blacklist is really cool but ‘aint going to work long term.
The problem really arises when you come to weblogs though, which are, of course, built on links. I don’t think that adding a CAPTCHA is too much here, Alex has done it rather well and as soon as I’ve got a minute I need to get over the technical headspace to do it too.