I’ve been really pleased with the way Ruse has been handling wiki
related spam on the Ruby Garden site. Now that Ruse has been deployed
for a while, I’ve tweaked a few things to make it even easier to clean
up spam.
Queued Review Mode: The original RubyGarden wiki took an
annoying number of clicks to clean a page of spam. Ruse has the
cleanup down to one click, but it takes an additional two clicks to
get to the next page to review. (goto to review page, choose next
page to review). The new Queued Review mode will now automatically
advance to the next page for reviewing, bringing you to a true “one
click per page” review mode. Click on the “Work from Queue” link on
the review page.
Bug Fix: The review page now correctly displays the
differences for the version you are reviewing. The original
behavior incorrectly showed the wrong revisions in the differences
section (although the page content was correct).
Minor changes and fixes: The size of the log page is now
configurable (rather than the fixed 25 entry size). Demotion during
review is now properly logged.
Future Directions
One technique that has proved very useful in preventing spam is the
content filtering that Ruse is able to do. We download the “bad url”
list from chonqged.org nightly and will reject all posts URL that
match that list. Currently, we can add additional URLS to the
blacklist by editting a configuration file on the server. Future
versions of Ruse might add a web interface to the local blacklist.
