Link Ban

CommunityWiki:WikiSpam is annoying.

When WikiSpam is posted, it’s almost always linking to some other place.

The basic idea is to reject any edit that includes a link that has already been identified as a spam destination.

Possibilities

Sharing Banned Links

Wiki that are friends with each other could share their link ban lists.

Appearance of Success

A wiki could grant the impression of a successful edit. Just replay the preview page as if it were a successful edit.

(See UserTargettedParallelUniverse, IdeasToPlace #99)

Implementations

Activity

No one, yet, that I know of.

Problems

(can anyone think of any?)

difficult to talk about turning it off

Once a problem domain is banned, all links to it are banned. If a problem domain becomes converted to a “good” domain after being banned, it’s still impossible to link to it. It’s tricky to even *talk* about the fact that it is now “good”.

(I’ve seen many “good” domains turn into problem domains. I’m speculating: Perhaps the reverse happens. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.)

work-around: use some sort of euphemism / name-mangling / phonetic alphabet to talk about the domain name.

might cause unexpected editing problems

Say a link to a domain name already exists on some page. Then later that domain name is banned. The next time a person edits that page, the wiki will reject those edits, unless he finds all the banned domain page links in that page and deletes them. That could be confusing if that person is simply trying to fix a tiny typo, several scrolls away from the problem URI.

work-around: Don’t add any more domain names to the ban list until you have globally searched and made sure that the *last* problem domain name that you added to the list has already been removed from all wiki pages.

Better fix (?): Only check the *diff* (perhaps +-3 lines around every changed line) for the problem domain name … ?

See Also