Wiki spammers have trouble viewing images in Opera

Posted by Angela Beesley on October 12, 2006 (Wiki, Wikia)

If users on your wiki are claiming to use Opera and asking why they can’t view images, I suggest you ban them.

It might sound a bit harsh for asking a question, but the “question” is actually being asked by a spam bot.

I got a little suspicious when I saw this question for the third time today when checking Wikia sites. The same IP had asked the question on 45 of my wikis. It turns out the posts are some sort of test run or dysfunctional spam bot.

Google has 822 hits for the question. It’s mostly being asked on forums, but also on wikis. On Wikia, the question is being asked on pages that are frequently edited only by spam bots and not by real users, like [[Talk:Main Page/]]. The extra / at the end is presumably a bug in the spam bot since the actual discussion of the main page would be at [[Talk:Main Page]]. This page, and dozens like it, has had a run of similar comments made with no links added, mixed in with posts where actual spam is added. Other posts there have asked for diet tips or just added junk like “asdasda”.

It’s especially annoying since it’s wasting people’s time far more than regular spam because people are assuming good faith, as you should on a wiki, and answering the question.

If you find something like this, make sure you put the page on your watchlist after deleting it since it’s likely they’ll return with real spam on the same page. [[Talk:Main Page/]] on MetaCollab has been deleted 10 times in the last 2 months.

Update: The anti-spam site Chongqed suggests that this is a spam bot designed to work on blogs. When it posts to wikis, there’s no “URL” field, so it doesn’t leave one, but it is leaving one on blogs.

6 Comments

  1. Minh Nguyễn said,

    October 24, 2006 at 14:55

    The funny thing is that, after someone asked that question at the Vietnamese Wikisource, I downloaded Opera just to see, and the images actually weren’t showing up for me. (The images were showing up just fine in Firefox.) It could’ve been a coincidence, because I think upload.wikimedia.org had problems on-and-off that day. Heh, maybe they’re spamming for Opera, trying to get Wikimedians to download the software so they can increase the download counter. :^)

     – Minh Nguyễn

  2. Angela Beesley said,

    October 24, 2006 at 15:05

    If anything, it’s going to turn people against Opera since there are now 56000 Google hits suggesting images don’t work with Opera. Perhaps Opera should be sueing the spammers for the damage to opinions about their product.

  3. helix84 said,

    October 24, 2006 at 20:27

    Actually, I’m an Opera user, too and sometimes the images indeed stop showing in Opera while still showing in other browsers. IIRC clearing cache and/or cookies helps.

  4. Johan said,

    October 25, 2006 at 4:49

    There are also 12 hits for wikipedia.org:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Why+i+can%27t+see+images+on+this+resource%22+site:wikipedia.org&filter=0

  5. Angela Beesley said,

    October 25, 2006 at 14:24

    Thanks for pointing that out Johan. I just deleted the Wikipedia ones I could find.

  6. ReyBrujo said,

    November 9, 2006 at 3:22

    Oh, we have had an Talk:Main_Page/ article in Wikipedia since August. Now that is curious. Thanks for the tip, I will pay more attention to / URLs. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page/&action=history

    People like to create subpages for their spam. Just take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3APrefixindex&from=Comparison+of+Internet+forum+software&namespace=1

    Take care,
    RB