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topege.com spam

Someone's spamming blocks of text into random articles, as shown here and here. This looks like a good candidate site for blacklisting. Thoughts? — Saxifrage ✎ 21:03, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

84.10.253.138 (talk · contribs · WHOIS) is a cello.pl IP (Poland), and 24.255.110.156 (talk · contribs · WHOIS) looks like a residental Cox Cable address. Both additions look like the work of bots. I'd say it's a good candidate for blacklisting. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 22:23, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's about as un-subtle as it gets. The domain itself is hosted on bulk servers and the contact is the 'set corp' in Russia; it's also only a few days old. Destined for the black hole. Kuru ^talk 22:25, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm actually unfamiliar about how sites get into the blacklist, which was the second reason I brought this up here. Can anyone enlighten me? — Saxifrage ✎ 22:31, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Propose its inclusion at the sitewide blacklist talk page. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 22:34, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've come across the "unknown" spambot a fair few times this last week - it switches IPs regularly and the links it's spamming... /wangi 22:34, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No, its part of a large network of zombie computers which, among other things, spam wikis. I bet in their spare time the zombies also spam in general, and are probably on some IRC network somewhere waiting for their next instruction. Kevin_b_er 04:39, 5 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

eyeorbit.org

Can someone look at the contributions of William charles caccamise sr, md (talk · contribs)? He is a new incarnation of Wccaccamise (talk · contribs). The only contributions of both are the addition of external links to his own writings at eyeorbit.org. The content appears to me to be more informational and commercial, but I don't know enough about the subject to determine whether they are actually useful or not. Either way it certainly violates Wikipedia:External links#Links_normally_to_be_avoided #3. Deli nk 15:55, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Reeks of spam. He's even attributing each link with his name. If I were to guess at motives, I'd say the purpose is to increase name-recognition as well as drive traffic. — Saxifrage ✎ 16:57, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Rating external links

Since it's not always easy to decide which links to remove, I was wondering if some sort of rating system might help. Wikia is going to introduce an article rating system, which could be adapted to rate specific parts of a page (such as an external link). There's a non-working demo at Scratchpad:Economics. Do you think this could be useful either in Wikipedia itself, or on a separate site as a resource for Wikipedians? I know voting is evil, but if the spam situation gets out of hand, it may be a more scalable solution than making judgements about each link yourself. Angela . 13:27, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't actually think that the spam problem is anywhere near getting out of hand—the automated spammers get caught by bot and blacklist, and the personal ones have the disadvantage, not us, in terms of numbers and time spent at Wikipedia. Apart from that, a rating system would probably encourage us to pay less attention to the content of external links rather than more. My intuition says it wouldn't be effective and might even be detrimental. — Saxifrage ✎ 16:54, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I take a somewhat grimmer view of spam (I think it's only likely to get worse), but a rating system might encourage efforts to "game the system". This is a pretty well known problem with moderation systems on web forums; given an incentive, people will find a way to manipulate the system using multiple accounts and "give me a good rating and I'll return the favor" type schemes. Even honest, trusted users are susceptible to groupthink, since it's a lot easier to mindlessly rate something than to give a coherent argument for or against it. Those are just my initial impressions; I'm not saying it's a terrible idea, and it might be useful in some circumstances. ―Wmahan . 17:54, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

G11 discussions

There's a new speedy deletion criteria out there. Its called G11, and as of right now its worded as "Blatant advertising. Pages which only promote a company, product, group or service and which would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become encyclopedic." See also Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-02/More_CSD. We should chime in on this. After all, we're about dealing with spam. There's some arguements on the talk page of WP:CSD about the wording and usage of it. Many admins have deleted pages as 'spam' in the past, so this is pretty much a formalization of it. It does have some conflicts in terms of wording though. Hopefully if this is your first exposure to this new speedy deletion category, I haven't tainted your opinion to my particular POV. :) Try to keep in mind that if you're a member of our nice little project, you are likely to be biased in favor of this criteria in some form or another. --Kevin_b_er 20:20, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

When useful sites spam Wikipedia

I'd be interested in opinions on what to do when useful sites admit to spamming Wikipedia. Do you leave the links in because they're actually useful to readers or remove them as spam? The author of "Developing link-bait using Wikipedia" added two links to his site in Cascading Style Sheets. I was tempted to remove them, but they may be relevant there. Angela . 05:18, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A link should only be left in if there is consensus from independent editors. (That a spamlink managed to remain for some time without being removed doesn't automatically validate it). Otherwise WP:EL#Links normally to be avoided point 3 still applies. Femto 10:55, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Spam needs to be removed whenever and wherever it is found. See the recent call-to-arms here: [1]. I've removed the link mentioned above, and also tracked a couple other links from related articles and comments made to those articles, and removed the links from those admitting to spamming WP. --AbsolutDan ^(talk) 13:16, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have to disagree firmly with you here. Many, many, many people have found this site useful. The fact that the owner added it himself should not be a reason for removing it. The fact that others call it spam shouldn't be either. The link should be judged by it's merits, and the site that it went through is one of the best online resources on CSS3.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.174.116.232 (talk • contribs)

It should be noted that the author of "Developing link bait 2: using Wikipedia" has updated the blog article to note that "The guys over at Wikipedia seem to have read this blogpost and are discussing it here" (the "here" being a link to this page and section). We're likely to get a non-zero number of people coming here through that to defend him, whether he wants them to or not. I suggest that we ignore IPs and single purpose accounts that suddenly pipe up here. — Saxifrage ✎ 19:55, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't need others to defend me, i can perfectly do that myself :). The point still stands, allthough i have to admit that you could get the wrong feeling from the quote in my article, that this link is VERY valid on this page. jdevalk

Granted that you don't, but if we see a bunch of IPs and new accounts join the discussion, it's good to know where they're coming from. Since Wikipedia's based on consensus and note "votes", we try to illuminate unbalancing or uninformed elements in the discussion.

The point is that Wikipedia is a public resource that should not be exploited by a few tech-savvy content creators. As Wikipedia grows and becomes even higher-profile than it already is, people will try to exploit it more. That you're writing a tutorial on how to do this is not very appreciated since it contributes to the lessening of Wikipedia's quality in the long run. You're making our job harder for personal gain. If you have to engineer your link into the article, that's actually an indication that it does not belong: if it needs help, it's not nearly so valuable as it's being made out to be, is it? — Saxifrage ✎ 20:45, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry that i'm making your job harder, that was never the intention of my article. And i honestly suggest that you check out my site, which was removed from the external links / demonstrations part of the page, and compare it to some of the other sites that are still there. I'm not just getting punished for talking about it, you're punishing the users by not showing them this great resource for CSS Level 3. I honestly feel that you should review the other links, and review my site, and consider if it should be there. If you then think it would mae a nice addition, add it, if you think it doesn't fit in, leave it out. But be fair, and judge the other sites in that list by the same rules. jdevalk

Having links at all is actually a pretty low priority at Wikipedia, since (non-reference) links don't really have anything to do with having a quality encyclopedia. Wikipedia is also not a Google replacement, so the argument that it should be there for the users holds no water. A link, ideally, is only included when it offers something that could never be in the encyclopedia itself, and really, the features of CSS3 will be in the encyclopedia one day, when the spec is stable. — Saxifrage ✎ 21:30, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Though i appreciate the point you are trying to make, you're avoiding my question of judging my site by the same rules as the other external links on that page. And you're also giving the perfect reason for including the link: one day, Wikipedia will have all this content, and once you do, i expect you to remove the link. At this point in time however, it does not include that info, so a link to a site that does, could be considered a quality improvement of the page. jdevalk

If any article contains any inappropriate links, those need to be removed as well. Just because one inappropriate link exists doesn't provide justification for keeping/adding other inappropriate links. Note that when I removed the link on Cascading Style Sheets, I also added the {{cleanup-spam}} tag. The article needs its other links trimmed down quite a bit as well.

The guidelines are quite clear on the addition of websites that you own or maintain: do not add them, plain and simple. --AbsolutDan ^(talk) 13:06, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Could you provide me a link to those guidelines? I won't add the site again, i just want to write a blogpost about this whole experience, telling people what can and what can't and shouldn't be done. I honestly didn't feel like i was spamming when i added my own page. jdevalk

Sure: WP:EL and WP:SPAM (particularly the section titled "How not to be a spammer"). Not to belabor the point, but if you didn't feel like you were spamming, why did you refer to the quote from Graywolf, who said "You could sit around pondering the woes of being called a spammer, while all of the other bleeding edge marketers are out there adding links and building pages. No one ever becomes a leader worrying about what others think of them ;-)."? --AbsolutDan ^(talk) 13:03, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Because i think that adding a link to your own site, if appropriate, isn't spamming, no matter what other people call you. --Jdevalk 14:47, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Think what you want. If someone ignores the neutrality policy and unilaterally decides their own site is appropriate to add, they're spamming. Femto 18:32, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've found out that that is your understanding yeah :). Nevermind, I won't add it back, it's been a cute learning experience :) --Jdevalk 04:52, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Adding a link to an article specifically to drive up their search engine rank, even if they think it's a good and relevant link, is the very definition of spamming. If someone is deliberately spamming, I would argue that such underhanded tactics undermines the reliablility of their content and we should be very leery of it. Deliberate abuse of Wikipedia like this deserves to be smacked down with prejudice, possibly blacklisted. — Saxifrage ✎ 19:08, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Stephen Colbert

I'm a bit uneasy with editors adding back external links to fan sites on this page which were removed by other editors... Why? Well it's clear that those adding the links back (Nofactzone (talk · contribs), Snarkivist (talk · contribs)) are the folk who run the sites. While there has been previous discussion on the article talk page it seems rather minimal... Might be worth taking a look if somebody has a spare moment. Thanks/wangi 20:20, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Google and Wikipedia share a common interest in combatting link-spam

Google hates link-spammers trying to game their rankings and may go so far as to just drop spamming sites out of their rankings altogether. I think one way to chill link-spamming might be to identify our link-spammers to Google.

As an organization (if you can even call it that), Wikipedia is not set up to "work with" other organizations such as Google. However, there has to be some way to develop a page Google and others can use that will list offending links. The Foundation's blacklist might be a start.

Consider the spam-chilling power of a warning template that says, in bold:

"In addition to being banned, if you continue to add spam links to Wikipedia, your links may be published on our list of repeat offender spam links. This list is publicly accessible to search engines and is sometimes used by search engine operators to identify search engine spammers for deletion from their rankings. Wikipedia is not responsible for search engine actions; contact the search engine operator directly if you have any questions"

Listing links on such a list would have to be reserved for repeat offenders since much of our spam is done by semi-innocent folks that quit as soon as they first learn they've broken the rules.

If such a list is developed, only admins should be allowed to add to it.

Just a thought. --A. B. 20:51, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I like this idea a lot. Even if coordination with Google isn't achieved, publishing a repeat-offenders list would be a useful resource. Heck, if we maintain such a list and search engine managers come to see is as being reliable, they might adopt it as a blacklist source without even needing to explicitly coordinate with them from the beginning. — Saxifrage ✎ 21:00, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It may be that SpamAssassin might adopt it as well. The trick would be reliability; falsely blocking sites is not good. And if our list is automatically used by anybody for enforcement, then we reduce incentives for people to spam their own sites but increase incentive for people to spam sites of their enemies (see Joe job for more). William Pietri 21:17, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's very true, and I don't see a good way around that problem. Alas. — Saxifrage ✎ 21:25, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

William, you make a very good point about Joe jobs; I had not thought of that. However, I think this is still worth considering -- we just need to consider how to better screen for such things. One possibility is sending e-mails to the point of contact listed on the domain registration page starting with the second or third offense, warning of the possibility. Perhaps that combined with a 30-day delay in posting the name. At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if Google and Yahoo are already encountering some link-spammer Joe jobs; ultimately we're not responsible for preventing or stopping Joe jobs. We're responsible for protecting Wikipedia in a reasonably responsible manner. Joe, in turn, is ultimately responsible for protecting himself from Joe jobs. Also, we would just publish the list -- the search engines could decide for themselves what to do with the information. If they pull the plug, that's their decision, not ours. —the preceding comment is by A. B. - 23:20, 9 October 2006 UTC: Please sign your posts!

I recently had dinner with Larry Page. He introduced me to Matt Cutts, who is the guy in charge of all this stuff at Google. Believe me, they take this stuff very seriously and are very open to ideas in this area. They are smart, and they know what they are doing. I will mention this concept to Matt and Larry. I am quite sure they will be very happy to take advantage of the intelligence of the Wikipedia community to protect both Google and Wikipedia (and the rest of the net). --Jimbo Wales 00:32, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I like the idea of publishing a list of URLs that have been deleted from Wikipedia articles because they constitute Web Spam. I think that list should be public (and not only shared with a specific company). IANAL but I also think it is legally safe to publish such list, given that the spammer, having contributed to the Wikipedia, agrees that his "contributions" (the spam URLs) are licensed under the GFDL --ChaTo 09:40, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Such a list wouldn't make any sense, since the first thing any blackhat SEO would do is add all his competitors in an overly spammy fashion, to make sure they are deleted and added to the list, to get them banned by whoever uses that list. --Jdevalk 15:33, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nah, the same could be said for any blacklist system, there are ways to deal with it. -- Stbalbach 15:44, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Such as? :) --Jdevalk 15:47, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What a fantastic way of increasing your page rating in Google! Why, all I would need to do was to spam all competitors onto Wikipedia, get them onto our blacklist and hey-presto, my corporate website appears at the top of the Google list. Good idea, but needs some thinking over I think. - Ta bu shi da yu 05:44, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. A lot. --Jdevalk 18:24, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Template Sharing

What is our policy of sharing our spam templates with other Wikis?

Not sure what you mean but since all content here is under WP:GFDL, nothing prevents anyone from copying the templates to other wikis with that license. Pascal.Tesson 18:51, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please Help!!

Over at Talk:Flow cytometry I attempted to enter into a discussion about the content of the article, (after tagging it as Spam and an advert) this was a mistake. I am sure you guys can offer some non-biased opinions. Thanks!!--DO11.10 18:48, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I did comment on the talk page but I have to say I have no definite opinion in this type of case. I do feel there is some value to keeping those links. I don't think the current guidelines really adress this kind of case. There is a distinct possibility that these ELs were added in good faith. Pascal.Tesson 18:59, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, entering these discussions always feels like a big mistake, at first. :) Looks like you've done some good and solid cleanup work. Femto 11:31, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Don't know where to put this...

...but one of the most notorious accumulators of SPAMs are country pages, EG Hungary, Spain, Indonesia, etc etc. I don't know where this would be best noted on the "pages to watch" section, so I'll ask here. 68.39.174.238 05:26, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

To the best of my knowledge, we don't currently have a "watchlist" of articles that are spammed frequently. Maybe we should start one. Any thoughts, folks? --AbsolutDan ^(talk) 18:31, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

bindiirwin.com heads-up

moved from wp:spam

It appears that blocked sockpuppeteer and listspam vandal user:Universe Daily has handed over the bindiirwin.com domain to the Irwins [2]. The name has now been removed from the meta blacklist. -- I@n 03:09, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ahh, there is some cosmic justice afterall. Thanks for the info --AbsolutDan ^(talk) 18:32, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

DudleyDoWrite & Blue Coat

Can someone take a look at the edits of DudleyDoWrite (talk · contribs), which seems to be a single purpose account for promoting Blue Coat Systems? I'd link a second opinion and suggestions on how to proceed to clean up the edits. JonHarder 21:38, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for spotting this. Dudley's been pretty busy and there's a lot to go through. I made a start, deleting a few links and leaving him a message -- see User talk:DudleyDoWrite. I've asked him to fix the problem himself. He's made some non-single purpose edits. Let's see if he'll fix the problem. Can you watch and follow up in a few days -- I'm tied down. Hopefully he's been operating in good faith mode.

--A. B. 22:25, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:AudioVideo, User:All electronics, User:Az movies, and User:All Electronics

I was just cruising through Special:Whatlinkshere for Template:User friendly when I stumbled on these two users, User:AudioVideo and User:All electronics. They have similar pages which both look like ads, and they have virtually no edits. I added the {{advert}} template to their pages, but I have a vague feeling that that won't do anything, and so am posting here. As I write this, I noticed that User:All electronics had no edits at all - even to the user page - so another user to check out is the sneakier (blank user page) User:All Electronics. If only I were an admin; I think these are of a kind that should be blocked on sight. No idea what process to follow, so I hope you of the WikiProject Spam can help me out. Thanks... Nihiltres 03:30, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Another one as I continued my crawl of Special:Whatlinkshere: User:Az movies.

Sent the spam to mfd. Kevin_b_er 22:48, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Users Consumer-electronics (talk · contribs), E-tronics (talk · contribs), Notebooks (talk · contribs), Fashion7 (talk · contribs), Fe7 (talk · contribs), Hf7 (talk · contribs) and Vg7 (talk · contribs) are related to this activity (link spamming to same sites). I've noticed that these users plus some Canada-based anon IPs place the same links into info boxes where they aren't easily noticed or embed the external link in a section of copyvio text pasted from another website. JonHarder 23:41, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How'd you find User:Notebooks, I'm rather curious? The only thing was adding a link to the website some of them are spamming way back in may. Was a page deleted somewhere from when you found them? Kevin_b_er 02:05, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I found almost all of these by seeing who entered links to fineelectronics.net. This is that partcular edit. JonHarder 02:17, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh man my spam finding skills are going downhill here. Gotta step it up :) Kevin_b_er 02:25, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Summary of activity

After tracing all of the edits I could find that were related to this spam campaign, this is the modus operandi uncovered:

Create multiple user accounts within the span of a few weeks.
Use the accounts to edit one article; in some cases two.
Edit obscure articles that not many editors watch or readers visit.
Add a legitmate looking Template:Infobox Company and place the spam link in the "products" place
or find a website with company information, such as a timeline, and paste that into the article with an embedded spam link.
abandon the user account.

The only thing tying all of these together is the similar pattern and the use of a small set of external links which can be traced with the link search tool. Their success was quite good, with less than half of their spam being discovered by other editors. It is possible there are still similar links out there that were added by other accounts that they were careful not to associate with the above users. Can someone come up with a way to search infoboxes that contain external links, other than the "official website"? JonHarder 13:16, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Linkspam Database

I was thinking, why not form a database of known spam links that was constantly updated? Would it not help us to fight spam better and identify it quicker and easier. I do not if this was the right venue to post this idea or if someone has come up with the same idea before, if so then I am sorry. I just wanted to know peoples' thoughts on the matter Cpuwhiz11 00:58, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There is a Spam blacklist which prevents those URLs being save on any Wikimedia (and some non-Wikimedia) wikis. Angela . 02:54, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

But the blacklist is the end of all spamfighting, when all is said and done. What I assume is proposed here is some means of organizing information about suspicious new links. The problem is, while this talk page serves as a short-term alert page, once some spamlinks are removed, there remains no long-term record of their history. Spamlinks might get removed by several people who neither know of each other nor have a reason to do a deeper search for similar spam from different accounts. As a whole, those links successfully remain below our radar.

Suppose we create a template message similar to {{spam-n}} but with a parameter to include a direct link in the warning (as I understand it, this link shouldn't improve any search engine rankings due to the rel="nofollow" attribute on talkpages, right?)

"Thanks for adding links to (http://somespamlink.com | search), BUT...".

This way, a permanent record about removed linkspam remains on the user talk pages, connected through the linksearch feature and easy to check for earlier spam activity.

Pros: Little extra effort in addition to a warning message that is used anyway. Spammy links become retraceable right from their first use, not only after someone gets suspicious and adds them to a spam database. The linksearch gives spam-socks the message that their activities haven't gone unnoticed, and it provides evidence which may get them killed faster.
Cons: Copy&pasting the links is a little extra effort nevertheless which may not always be worth it. Not immune to permanent-link-archival or talkpage-blanking (though better than nothing and removed warnings usually get reverted anyway). Harder to get an overview than with a centralized approach.

? - Femto 11:38, 15 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Femto, see my comments below, I've also come the conclusion we need better processes for dealing with link spam. Your proposal sounds like an interesting start. Linkspam almost has to be dealt with in the same way banned users are, with warnings, history, appeals -- the current spam blacklist is great, but misses the earlier steps and only catches the clear cut abuse cases being tracked by a single user. -- Stbalbach 12:38, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Forums, online petitions and other sites

Although I am not a member of this WikiProject, I always remove external links that do not seem suitable for articles. Since forums, online petitions and some sites are bound to be included in Wikipedia, I built some small tables with the information I recompiled. Feel free to drop by User:ReyBrujo/Base/Tasks and review the current situation there. -- ReyBrujo 04:15, 15 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't care who's a member :) and added your page to the to-do on the project page anyway. Femto 11:14, 15 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Could I get a little extra help on Herbalife?

Hi! I just noticed that some Herbalife distributors aim to improve our Herbalife article, and that they are concerned I am biased [3]. I don't think I am, and certainly not for the reasons they mention, but in the interests of fairness, I'd like a few other people to keep an eye on the article in my stead. And I'm asking here because I'd like those people to have an awareness of the problems typically caused by single-purpose accounts and people with conflist-of-interest issues. Thanks, William Pietri 05:35, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh lovely, Herbalife is recruiting supporters through their blog to edit the article. They pay lip service to the policies and guidelines, but seem to be unaware of WP:MEATPUPPET. — Saxifrage ✎ 07:18, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

probable spammer

An IP user (contribs) added a link to Carrot this morning to a nutrition website, but the info ws already contained in the article. Link search seems to line up with this IP's contribs. --SB_Johnny|^talk|_books 09:18, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Need help with Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.

There seems to be concerted effort to add external links to the the website of Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.. There is much more than I have time to handle right now. I have cleaned up the edits of users Aetkin (talk · contribs) and Tmulak (talk · contribs). I discovered liebert's own IP, 198.65.193.67 (talk · contribs) has been adding material, so those contribs would be a place to start. See articles with liebert links for other problems. JonHarder 18:48, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I left a pointed message backing up your own; I don't know if it will help. --A. B. 20:58, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Note that Tmulak may be Tom Mulak, an officer at this company; see

http://www.liebertpub dot com/media/content/serialsreview.pdf

I am reluctant to delete many of the remaining links since many appear to have been place by regular contributors to these articles. --A. B. 23:45, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I restored the interview link because I believe that it provides valuable insight into the background of the company. I am not an employee of MAL and have no special interest in the company other than that I like the scientific journals it publishes and I want the Wikipedia article to be informative. Anti-commerical fanaticism has the danger of censoring valuable information, which I think may be what is happening in this case. And I am not a person with much patience for spam-link advertising! --Ben Best 00:33, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

With other corporations' articles, I have seen editors prune links to the corporate web site back to just one link to the company's web site. That was the precedent I was following here, however I am not aware of any policy that mandates this

If you can, please take a look at the contributions of the following and see which other deleted links you think should be restored:

Note that most of the older link additions have been deleted previously by regular contributors to those articles. I have been operating on the principle that if they're added by others they should stay and but they should not be added by the publishers per WP:AUTO, WP:EL and WP:COI -- is that a correct interpretation of those guidelines?

Thanks, --A. B. 11:36, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. Your characterization of my editing as "Anti-commerical fanaticism" and "censoring" .... all I can say is "Ouch!"

Well, it wasn't quite that bad -- I said "has the danger of censoring". And I was warning of the danger of "anti-commerical fanaticism" without saying that your edit was definitely an example (although I did say I thought it "may be happening"). Sorry if I caused any pain by my remark. Whatever the general guidelines, I think that the personal interview with MAL is a valuable addition to the article and the background of the subject which a general reader might not find by going to the corporate website, even though the interview can be found on the corporate website. I believe general guidelines should be viewed with the awareness that the specifics of life are often best accommodated with specific responses --Ben Best 15:45, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK,thanks for your clarification; based on your general reputation, I figured you weren't trying to be mean. My main interest, however, was not in my PS above but with all the links we reversed and the overall pattern of contributions by this company's people. Can you look at these and see which additions by them and/or deletions by us are inappropriate? If we've reversed dozens of valid edits (I don't think we have), we need to fix it ASAP. Thanks. --A. B. 17:04, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I am glad there are no hard feelings and no hurt feelings. (I didn't know I had a "reputation"). In any case, I believe that the entry now contains all or most of the relevant information -- minus the promotional hype that had been introduced by the employee who overwrote what I had to say when I started it. The main thing that I think would be informative and of interest would be a COMPLETE list of the journals produced by MAL, Inc. You deleted both the link to the list and the interview and I protested the deletion of the interview, but not the list. Unlike the interview, the list of publications is the first thing you see when you go to the company website, so I think that the entry is good as it stands. (Pardon my verbose wool-gathering response.) --Ben Best 18:21, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"I didn't know I had a "reputation". Don't worry, it's good! --A. B. 18:28, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hope I am doing this right as I am still very new to this!

Regarding the above communications regarding the recent flurry of activity as far as adding various Liebert info/links to Wiki, I must take most responsibility & offer apologies. My/our intent was never to "spam" or abuse wiki in any way. We find wiki (as many do) to be an increasingly important resource to all & simply wanted to add our resources in the appropriate categories for any who would be interested. Tom Mulak is indeed at the company with me & we both had been asked to take this on as a sort of project. I do not personally know Ben Best, but it seems he is someone outside the company who is aware of our presence in the industry & added various info on us of his own accord. I actually thank him for this! I had not responded to JonHarder (& others) sooner as 1, I really did not know how (I'm still unsure if this is the correct way) & I only saw his message (& others) after I'd finished adding what we thought were links within the wiki guidelines....um....yes.....I think we are "done" for now. ;-)

Please accept my sincere apologies & let me know what we can do to "fix" things or if we should just leave all as is for now.

Aetkin 01:59, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

pmemory.com

Some additional opinions would be appreciated at Talk:Eidetic memory regarding a link to pmemory.com, which appears (to me and one other editor) to be promotional in purpose, and not a useful link at the least. Thanks --AbsolutDan ^(talk) 03:38, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

...and Talk:Mnemonic, please. Thanks --AbsolutDan ^(talk) 03:51, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Common linkspam page?

I've been keeping a personal reminder page of linkspam I come across using the Search web links feature. For example:

GeekGirlEssays - spam site. 09/2006
GeekGirlQuotes - spam site. 09/2006
Peterabelard.com spam site. 10/2006

This way I can periodically check if spam is creeping back in. It would be great if there was a central place everyone could note these and track them. Does such a thing exist, officially or through a project? -- Stbalbach 12:25, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, reading above I see Spam blacklist. This seems like a good solution for clear cut cases but there are some that require warnings and monitoring, such as with blocking a user (like the {test1}..{test2}.. series of tempaltes). I think we need a better process for adding links to the spam blacklist. Also if we follow the Google sharing idea, there needs to be a way to differentiate between real spam, and spam that is inappropriate for Wikipedia but OK for Google. -- Stbalbach 12:31, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've got a pretty big list of spammed sites here that could be included. I have also been working on an off-wiki database of spam that allows searching by domain name, IP address, or account name. My idea was that a separate database would provide an organized way of tracking spam even after it is removed. For example, a script could do automated linksearches for spammed domains and report if links have been re-added.

The code for the database is working, but the obstacle has been deciding how to control access to it. If anyone is allowed to insert or change information in the database, spammers and vandals would probably fill it with junk data. For technical reasons, it's not currently possible to limit access based on Wikipedia user name and password. ―Wmahan . 14:19, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Great idea -- I can't wait for you to get this running! --A. B. 18:25, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Love the database concept. I've been keeping my own list for some spam (too lazy to record it all) here. Just seeing the way Wmahan has kept his list has already helped me improve the format for mine. Would be happy to change over to a format consistent with others or at a central place if it would help. --Siobhan Hansa 18:35, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's a great idea. If en ever rolls out OpenID support then a Wikipedia-account-based access scheme would be feasible. I wonder if this would be motive enough for Brion to implement at least outgoing OpenID?

Also as a general note for anyone keeping Special:Linksearch lists, I made a template to simplify that: {{linksearch}}. — Saxifrage ✎ 19:55, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Linksearch is a big help, thanks. -- Stbalbach 01:54, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

External links in Cascading Style Sheets

Above was outrageous with over 60 tutorial and example links present. I've culled it right back in the hope that new links be scrutinised a bit more thoroughly. Given the size of the EL section, no doubt there'll be plenty of howls so it'd be appreciated if others can keep an eye on this article also. -- Moondyne 15:04, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Note this recent addition; I think it's a probe from our friend above. It's probably best considered a troll edit to annoy us.--A. B. 18:34, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Epizone

User Epizone (talk · contribs) seems to be starting out on the wrong foot. I've placed a couple of warnings about articles contribution. What about the user page itself? It feels like that has crossed the line, but not exactly sure where the line is. JonHarder 17:19, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I blanked the userpage as it was clearly against WP:USERPAGE and WP:NOT. I left a message explaining my action with a request to not repost the advertising. — Saxifrage ✎ 20:02, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Online music store

Online music store is heading for keep in a current AfD, but what a mess. I just cleaned out a recent very blatant load of spam. Editors must be asleep at the wheel. I hope it doesn't get worse than this ... JonHarder 17:37, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Help with israel-music.com

There are about a dozen or so links to israel-music.com that I don't have time to deal with right now. The site is blatantly commercial with no encyclopedic value that is apparent to me. JonHarder 19:50, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I reversed some links and ran out of time. Most of the links I deleted were added by different high volume, good faith editors of Israel-related articles; this makes me think that this company may be like amazon.com -- something 1000s of editors link to without thinking about whether it's commercial or not. Maybe the links should be deleted, but there's no spam campaign that I can see. --A. B. 20:31, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Check edits of 87.69.67.222 (talk · contribs) (resolves to namespace in Israel). Maybe most of those have been cleaned out by now. JonHarder 20:50, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Cross-wiki spamming

User Citracyde (talk · contribs) has been adding links to wiki-recipe.org and wikibartender.org. This user is either an exuberant wiki-editor or trying to drive traffic to these two sites. The cynic in me says the latter. Both of these sites are housed on the same server; the bartender site get revenue through advertising and I suspect the other is headed that way too. Thoughts? JonHarder 21:22, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest starting with a nice note on this editor's talk page -- so far this person seems amenable to others' feedback. --A. B. 21:39, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I've added a note. We'll see what happens. JonHarder 01:30, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, Jon. My appologies I guess everyone tends to play to their strengths over time. I started my short wikipedia career trying to write a few articles (probably what most would consider stubs and did not fair too well with my fellow wikipedians). After checking out my history, I too noticed that over the last week or so I've been cruising around just fiddling with links. I found the couple of wiki sites through a friend and figured I could maybe focus on links more than content. You make a good point. I should have read the rules a bit closer. Thanks for the heads up. I'll have to contribute another way, I guess. --Citracyde 01:51, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Related page for over-nice articles on real companies?