testanything.org
There seems to be a problem with spam on the Perl-related website "testanything.org":
http://testanything.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Recentchanges
This has been going on for about a year I think. Almost all of the pages on that wiki are spam pages, as you will find out if you try the "random page" feature:
http://testanything.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Random
Since people still seem to think that the site is valid, I wrote to the person who owns the site, but didn't get a reply.
If this is not a concern, then never mind, but just in case I am the only person who has noticed this, I would like to draw attention to it.
I blog about Perl.
I'm seeing more of this wiki spams elsewhere too. The spam posts are mostly to the User pages instead of to existing articles, though that might change in the future.
There are some extensions/plugins to Mediawiki that deal with sort of things, though I haven't tried them myself.
We had some termites attacking our bathroom and they just left this little shred of wood at the surface so that the wood damage was difficult to notice. The builder said "These insects are extremely clever".
A few years ago I ran a website using MediaWiki. A big problem for a lazy person like me was that it needed to be continually updated because of security problems. This was why I stopped using it.
In this case I am a bit concerned because I tried emailing the site owner and got no response, hence the blog post here. I hope it's not overkill.
I've done some spam removing in the past, but it's just too much, and I'm not using that website much. I'd vote for a reset to a backup from a couple of months ago, if possible.
OK, if people are already aware of the problem this blog post wasn't necessary.
The same issue applies to the Perl Win32 wiki and the public OTRS wiki; these all are mediawikis. The backup from a few months ago is also probably still spammed to death. The best would be if someone would care enough to set up a new mediawiki (or perlish wiki) and migrate any valid content. But it would require lots of tuits.
But what happened if the new Mediawiki gets spammer too :)
A hosted solution, where the provider cares enough to keep its platform clean from spam, could be a good alternative. There are plenty for blogs (e.g. blogspot, with its CAPTCHA and all to keep spammers at bay), but I don't know any for wiki.
we had the same issue with old wxperl wiki too. just set up once with better checks. see wxperl.info works now pretty decent.