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Ding Dong the Wiki is Gone

I now have an extra 4 gigs free after removing my spam trap wiki!

I feel so much cleaner ;-)

Besides all the pr0n links, the interesting part was the groups of links that were hidden in 1px wide DIV tags. These entries never showed up when looking at the page. It was as if those responsible for adding the entries were trying to up their Google search result ratings by having more sites "link to" their site.... even if those sites never display them.

Here's how it works..

1. Somebody with a site wants that site to become popular and rank higher in Google's search results.
2. That somebody is usually a low quality scam site of some sort that usually promises to offer something for nothing and installs spy ware instead.
3. That somebody gets a bot to find all the wikis out there because wikis are notoriously insecure and (by design) allow the general public to come in and edit entries.
4. They then use another bot to connect to all those open wikis and create entries that point to their site. The links include all sorts of descriptions to what may actually be there - perfect for a Google (or similar) that's crawling the wiki to find.
5. As an added bonus, the bot may hide the entries in 1px DIV tags so it appears invisible to the human viewer.
6. Now, when somebody Google's for the term that has been embedded in all those wikis - their site will be high on the list. I mean, if all those sites link to it - it must be good? right? ;-)
7. Profit! I think? Nope - that was the underwhere gnomes, and they got that way back at step 3

Where does the disk space go?

Today I went to my Dreamhost control panel & it showed that I was using 1% of my 461.8GB of disk space. 1%? I've never noticed it that high before. On closer inspection that's 4.9 gig!? The last time I checked it was less than 1/2 gig.

Digging around shows that the DB used for my wiki was taking 4 GB.

My Wiki? I have a wiki?

Ohh, now I remember.
Over a year (or two?) ago I installed a wiki on this site because - well, it was easy enough to. Dreamhost has a bunch of one-click installs & all I had to do was click a button. I played around with the wiki and figured out how things worked - and then ignored it.

While I was busy with our new baby Seamus and work, automated spam bots filled my little test wiki with 4 gigs of junk!

I'm now going to go lock the wiki and find out what exactly is in there. I'll be impressed if it's all text. That's a lot of spam bot activity!

UPDATE
All Main Pages on the wiki

It's an odd assortment to say the least