GooGle is going to finally help in the Spam Wars via a [No Follow] tag attribute which blog software developers can use in their Comment forms to reduce the Page Rank benefit of Comment Spam. See z2004-02-08- Comment Spam Idea for similar idea. Here's GooGle's official announcement plus some comments from Dave Winer.

How might you apply this to Wiki Spam?

One idea:

• follow ZWiki model of distinguishing Appends from Edits

• allow anonymous users only to Append (you could still support authentication and give out accounts with Edit privileges to some number of people).

• wrap something around each Append comment's Smart Ascii as its added

• when rendering a page, take any external links within such tags and add the [No Follow] attribute

Variant that doesn't even use [No Follow] tag:

• limit users to Append, and remove http:// from the Smart Ascii itself. That way the link doesn't render.

  • probably have to separately handle href tags in Appends - removing the http:// will leave an href that the browser will think is local to your server, so you'll still get a link, but it won't be valid.

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