Spam

Spam is a form of unwanted communication with the intention of disrupting normal activities. Spam is not free speech and is considered Illegal under United States law, and the law of many other nations.

Throughout this Wiki's existence, it has been victim of large amounts of spam attacks, mostly for SEO purposes. These spam attacks include Markov Bots posting unintelligible pseudo-English and articles from dubious sources regarding cosmetic dentistry and surgery, usually with links to strange thai gambling sites, affiliate farms and the like. The recent AI craze brought about a ton of spam with links to fake clones of ChatGPT and other freely-accessible generative AI chatbots. In the past there have often been - usually fairly harmless - "attacks" from individuals unhappy about the name or content of articles, or merely for laughs (for example moving GNU/Linux to GNU/Linux on Wheels on Wheels on Wheels...)

Few contribute to this wiki, and at this time the vast majority of edits are spam. However, administration of this version are dealing with the matter and spam is readily tackled both with simple filter protection (for automated Xrumer-type spam) and manual intervention when required.

What you can do to help!

While some things are outside of the general user's ability, you do have the ability to help clean and maintain the wiki. Everytime you see an article that is obvious spam, delete the entire article (a process known as blanking) and replace it with the template text {{delete|spam}}. This will remove the article's text, put it in the deletion category, and show that it is spam to general users.

After you do this, find the user who published the article, and put on their userpage {{delete|spam}} as well. This will do the same and will allow a collection of spam accounts to build up on the deletion category.

You can also find more spam pages to do this to by looking at spam user's contributions.

It is very important to blank the page because this prevents the page from coming back in search results (with the exception of the words in the page title, of course).