Akismet plugin for PBwiki?

Hi Scott,

Good question. We actually experimented with using Akismet behind-the-scenes for a while but that plugin relies on comparing new blog comments against existing comments which have been flagged as spam. Problem is, spammy wiki edits don't really look like blog comments and we didn't get the hit-to-miss ratio we needed.

On public wikis, we run a wiki spam filter system we developed in-house. It compares added urls to known spam sites, checks for known spammy phrases and words, and examines general wiki parameters.

The spam filter has two goals - first, identify wikis which are made by people attempting to use the whole wiki as a spam site, with links to their crummy pills websites and 'please update your paypal login info' phishing pages. The other goal is to protect legitimate public wikis. We've seen all sorts of approaches to posting links to spam websites on public wikis, and so far we think we do a pretty good job of guarding against wiki defacement.

This is much less of an issue on 2.0 wikis since they use a verified email round-trip for user identification. In the longer term, we're working on some great tools which will allow you to list, flag-as-spam, and even roll back changes made by particular users, so even if somebody slips through our filters their junk out with just a few clicks. Stay tuned!