We have been down for nearly a week as a result of a DDoS. We needed to switch providers. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

There may be some bugs which occur as a result of the move. Please let us know if you find any.

Thank you --Robin 21:14, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

From CastleCopsWiki

[edit] What is wiki spam?

WikiSpam is the wiki equivalent of e-mail and blog spam. Wiki spammers edit pages to include advertising links to their sites. Spam links appear as full URLS (e.g. http://example.com), as named links with a spam keyword, or as numbered links (e.g. [1]). Often a spammer will completely replace the legitimate content of a page with their spam, and may add many different links, with a range of URLS and keywords.

[edit] Why are the spammers doing this?

Spammers are not really hoping that you will click on their links, although if you do they are likely to be happier. Their actual goal is to improve their position in Google searches. Wikis are characterized by their open access and willingness to let anyone edit pages. Google measures its PageRank based on links from one site to another, weighted by the PageRank of the site linking to the other. Wikis are PageRank machines, being both massively linked and with hundreds or thousands of pages. These two factors, openness and PageRank, make wikis a tempting target for spam attacks.

For CastleCopsWiki spamming is pointless, because external links have the rel=nofollow attribute, which means they will get no Google ranking boost from the wiki at all. Spammers will still attack these wikis regardless. This is because they tend to just carpet-bomb all wikis they come across (Most spammers are not very smart)

[edit] How to remove spam

Anyone who can edit the wiki can manually revert abusive edits. MediaWiki (and all good wiki software) allows you to overwrite the current (spammed) version of a page with an older version.

• Click "History" tab at the top of a page
• Click on the link of the revision you want to recover (the date) This will take you to a page with the text of the old revision.
• Click "Edit" tab at the top.
• Add a summary, such as "revert spam" and click the 'Save' button.

When you revert a change, the previous spammed version of the page is still available under the "History" link. As a user, there is nothing you can do about this. It has to be this way, because otherwise vandals could do malicious reverting of changes.

[edit] Watching out for Wiki Spam

Always use the recent changes display to watch for spam. It is not enough to just look at the important pages of your wiki. Spammers have been known to find sneaky ways creating spam pages on a wiki in places where they may go unnoticed. This is particularly a problem on MediaWiki software (see MediaWiki Default Pages Spam), but all edits will appear on 'Recent changes'...

[edit] Spam Blacklist

To further discourage spammers, an edit filter, Spam blacklist, has been added which prevents spammers from "spamversizing" their favourite commercial site.