On Monday 11 December 2006 21:42, Esben Stien wrote: > That's a big point in having a wiki where you don't have to > register. You actually have no, absolutely zero, maintenance, > because the users removes the spam. > > You install a wiki, then leave it be. That's great with a wiki that has a wildly active userbase, like Wikipedia. On any other wiki, what the spammers count on for their business model is that people are not looking at the recent changes page 20 times a day to delete Chinese search engine bait. On a public site with a moderate pagerank and a few hundred users making updates a few dozen times a day, like the one I ran for Gambas documentation (it's still there, and still called a wiki, but it's really a CMS with more structure than a wiki) once they found it, it was totally out of hand. Even with registration, if you're running any common kind of wiki software, like Mediawiki or TWiki, there are thousands of bots out there that will auto-register and post spam. You need a CAPTCHA or email verification besides the registration. And even if your site is as active as Wikipedia, that means the site is big enough that it's going to need constant maintenance anyway for non-content-related reasons. The truth is that wikis, like gardens, need to be tended constantly or they get vermin and weeds. In no way is it a "set it and forget it" situation. Rob
